by Alan Cumyn
Slowly and stiffly he lowered himself down to the ground. As quietly as he could he replaced the ladder. Then he stood in the chill and watched the bruised clouds at dawn crawl across the sky.
Nothing more at her window. He could see the hole where his fist had gone through.
But then, a hand. A paper airplane glided down. A gust caught it and for a second it looked like it might end up in a tree. But it landed finally in a chilly bush. Stan reached it with just a small jump.
I like you, Stan Dart. I really do.
No signature. Just a faint image of a beautiful girl, behind a screen, watching him.
20
Six-thirty a.m. Stan ran into the gym in his street clothes and his old runners. The place was crawling with guys in shorts and jerseys, guys rubbing the sleep out of their eyes, guys who smelled already from nervous perspiration. Balls bounced everywhere, arced toward quiet hoops.
Most of the JV team from last year was there, and the ten returning seniors, and plenty of others. Just as Stan had thought, the gym was full of sweaty guys up too early, trying too hard, to fill just two spots.
Karl Brolin, Jamie Hartleman and the others had commandeered the south hoop. Like this was their private club. Brolin especially looked unconcerned, dragging his ass, slapping someone in mock defense.
Where was Coach Burgess? No time to hesitate. Stan ran straight onto the floor.
“Hey, Brolin!” The big guy didn’t turn around. “One on one, right now! You and me. Game to five!”
Someone laughed. A mosquito was challenging an elephant. Brolin turned his head slightly.
“Come on! Five bucks! I get the ball first!”
Stan didn’t have five bucks on him. He didn’t even have his gym gear. It was all back at the house but if he’d gone home from Janine’s he would have never made it to tryout. Somebody would have woken up. So he had walked and walked until the chilly dawn turned older.
“Do I know you?” Brolin asked.
“That’s the fucking guy from the game,” Hartleman said. “Kid can shoot.”
Stan snagged a loose ball and set up just past the top of the key. “Game to five, five bucks. I don’t have much time.”
His mother’s alarm rang at seven. If Stan wasn’t on the spot to explain Feldon and the disappearance of Ron, the house might go up in a mushroom cloud.
“Where’s your fucking gear?” Brolin asked. But he was smiling. He threw away the ball he was holding, took a step toward Stan. The others stood back a few steps. Stan launched a shot from where he was standing.
Swish.
“That’s one!” he said.
“I didn’t say we’d started yet,” Brolin said. “Gotta check the ball first.”
But Hartleman fired it back to Stan. “That’s one, Karl! I told you the kid could shoot.”
As soon as the ball touched Stan’s hands he shot it again.
“Two!” he said, even before it went in.
“Kid can shoot! You got to play some D, fat ass!” Hartleman said.
Brolin walked the ball out to Stan and took a defensive stance close to him, hands ready. Angry breath. Stan motioned to shoot and Brolin rose above him like a sudden skyscraper . . . that Stan zipped around. A nervous layup. The ball circled the rim, circled . . .
“Please go in,” Stan muttered.
“Three! Kid’s got three!”
Everyone was crowded round now. All the other balls stopped bouncing. It was like a playground fight. Brolin shoved the ball at Stan, then slapped it away, elbowed his way to the basket. Slam dunk.
“One,” he grunted.
At the top of the key again Brolin took his own long shot. What was he thinking? No spin, flat arc, clang off the rim. Stan grabbed the rebound, scooted to the corner past the three-point line, then launched another shot before Brolin got on him.
“Four! Kid’s got fucking four!”
“What’s going on here?” Coach Burgess said. He just materialized somehow. He wasn’t a yelling kind of coach. He was worse, as far as Stan had heard — a man who never raised his voice. Never repeated himself.
“Who opened the equipment room?” he asked quietly.
Karl Brolin hung his head.
“You want to play for me, you work first. Understood?”
Someone dropped a basketball that bounced twice, like embarrassed thunder, before he could corral it again in clumsy hands. Marty Wilkens. What was he even doing here?
Burgess stared him into cold stone. Then slowly his eyes fixed on Stan.
“Where’s your gear?”
Stan couldn’t think of what to say.
“Anyone who wants to play for me respects this gym, respects the game.”
“Yes, sir,” Stan said. Then, “I have to leave anyway.”
“What?”
“My mom gets up at seven o’clock,” Stan said. As if that could explain anything.
“Kid can shoot, Coach,” Jamie Hartleman said, but in a pleading tone.
“Take your disrespect and get the hell out of here,” Burgess said to Stan. He turned his head slightly. “Brolin — a hundred pushups. Right now. I don’t care if you die doing them. Everybody else — fifty sprints. Length of the gym. Call out your numbers.”
Nobody moved.
“Go!”
21
“Mom?” Just before seven Stan stood quiet as a burglar outside her door, his chest heaving. He’d run all the way home, his fifty sprints and more, fast as spit, with no one watching.
He’d just ensured that never in his lifetime would he make the senior varsity team.
“Mom. I’d like to come in.”
He’d picked up Mr. Strawberry on the front porch to give to Lily as soon as she woke up.
“Stan?”
Flushing from the ensuite bathroom. Then he heard the closet opening and closing. She was looking for her robe.
When she opened the bedroom door she stood, so tired she was practically vibrating in her red satin robe. Her hair looked like she’d been clutching it and letting go all night long.
“Dad took off. I convinced him to leave Feldon with us. Kelly-Ann is coming to get him . . . I’m . . . sure.”
His mother looked like she was in a dream.
“Have you been out running or something? Why do you have Mr. Strawberry?” she asked.
He told her about the taxi, about saving Feldon.
“Feldon is here?” she said.
“He’s in my room. Dad was leaving in the middle of the night. He wanted to take Feldon but I convinced him . . .” It was like the remote. No matter how patiently he went over it, she still couldn’t seem to get it.
“When is Kelly-Ann coming?” she asked finally.
“When we call her, I guess.”
“You guess?” His mother looked around, lost. “And Feldon is sleeping in your bed?”
Stan took her into his bedroom to show her . . . the unmade empty bed, Feldonless.
“He was here.” Stan knew he sounded ridiculous.
“You lost him?” Now his mother was waking up. Stan pulled back the rumpled covers as if the kid might have made himself so small he could be hiding there. Then Stan kneeled down and looked under the bed, remembering how Feldon had hidden in the kitchen cupboard just the day before.
No one. Feldon was not there.
“Your father left him in your care and you’ve lost him?”
“I gave him my bed and . . .” Stan didn’t want to go into any further details. It was his business what he did after saving his half-brother from a wasted life with a cowardly dimwit of a father.
“And what? What did you do?”
He could say that he had slept on the pull-out. It was still rumpled — probably. Probably it would sound true and all he’d be then was a liar.
“Mr. Strawberry!” Lily blurted and launched herself at Stan. “You found him!”
Her pajamas were soaking. Stan could smell it almost before —
“Lily! Oh, God, Lily!”
>
Lily started to just scream in the middle of Stan’s room with Mr. Strawberry wrapped around her neck.
“Stop screaming!”
Stan moved quickly to carry off the kicking girl. She screamed and screamed directly in his ear, and pounded her fists against his back, but he held on until she was simply sobbing against him.
“It’s all right. It’s all right, sweet knees,” he whispered to her.
He carried her downstairs. A sign on the toilet, in his mother’s hand, read FLUSH AND I WILL KILL YOU. Stan filled the tub for Lily, who started shrieking again until she couldn’t catch her breath anymore. Then Stan handed her a warm washcloth so that it became more or less all right.
Stan’s mother burst into the bathroom holding a reeking wad of Lily’s sheets. “Lily, where did Feldon go?”
“Feldon is gone?”
“It’s all right!” Stan said quickly. “Dad’s gone again. But I made sure he left Feldon. But we don’t know if Dad came back in the night to get him?”
Why hadn’t Stan paid more attention? It would be just like Ron to change his mind in the taxi and come back and steal Feldon away.
“Lily!” Stan’s mother said.
“Feldon would have told me if he was going anywhere.” Lily splashed quietly now, not looking at either of them.
“What I’m saying is that last night Dad was going to take Feldon away. They were both going to leave in a taxi . . .”
“But where?”
Someone knocked on the bathroom door. “I need to go pee-pee!” said a little voice.
Stan’s mother ripped open the door. Feldon was standing in his clothes — the ones from last night — holding himself and doing a little dance.
“Oh, for God’s sake!” Stan’s mother said.
“Feldon slept with me last night!” Lily said.
“I have to go!” Feldon danced and held himself.
“Well, I don’t want to see your nib thing!” Lily yelled back.
Stan took him to the upstairs bathroom.
“It stinks in here,” Feldon said, but Stan got him to plug his nose.
“I thought you were gone!” he said.
“Lily came and got me,” Feldon said, his pants around his ankles.
“Lily did?”
“She saved me from the taxi man.” When Feldon turned around to explain he almost sprayed Stan, who stepped deftly.
“Keep your eye on the bowl there, big shooter!” Stan felt like laughing. “It wasn’t Lily, it was me, Feldon! I was the one who saved you last night.”
—
There was not much time now to explain it all again to Stan’s mother, to get her to understand. Some things she grasped much better than Stan, but they tended to be old things. Mortgages. Finances in general. Love, probably — although Stan was beginning to see that even now she hardly understood anything about it, and that was a sobering thought. The woman who had married Ron did not have a firm grasp on the most important human endeavor.
Love.
Love was the most important human endeavor. Stan could see that now, too, even as he was explaining Feldon’s presence and Ron’s absence yet again to his mother, who was running around in her bedroom looking for a clean outfit to wear to what might be her last day of work.
It was Monday, the day of the all-staff meeting when something extraordinary was about to be announced — extraordinary but probably not good. Good would have been announced on Friday, so they would all have had the weekend to celebrate. So probably bankruptcy, funding pulled, or some other collapse.
“I have to go! I have to go!” she said, fiddling with her earrings. She was constitutionally incapable of stepping foot outside the house before she’d re-applied her lipstick. If it was going to be the end she’d look well put together at least.
Stan felt like he could look at women differently now. Not long ago he had stood on a ladder clutching the wall of a woman at a very odd hour before sunrise.
“Today of all days I have to go and simply can’t look after Feldon!” she said.
“I’ll stay with him,” Stan said.
“You have school!” She was changing her earrings now. She had a very female way of cocking her head while putting on earrings.
She was exchanging black for white — beads for pearls. She was a good mother. He felt calmer just watching her.
“You can’t just skip class to babysit,” she said. “I’ll call Kelly-Ann from work. She must be out of her mind with worry.”
“I don’t have anything big today,” Stan said. “I’ve got all my textbooks at home anyway. I’ll just work from here.” He felt calm. A windless lake at dawn. The man who was up 4-1 on Karl Brolin before Coach Burgess walked in.
“You had something on today,” she said. Shoes now — the black or the beige? Height or comfort?
“Nothing. It’s all review.”
A narrow escape, now that he thought of it. Who would ever want to play for Coach Burgess?
She went for height. Black went with pearls. Then she changed her belt — a smaller silver buckle for her skirt. She hadn’t had breakfast yet. How often did she leave home just like this, in a panic, without breakfast?
“You had something special today,” she pressed. “What are you forgetting? I know you told me!”
She stopped to look at him. Gary was stuck on her. That’s why Gary was hanging around. He wasn’t much to look at but he could spin a ball into a hoop backwards with people watching.
“It’s a nothing day,” Stan said. “You call Kelly-Ann. I’ll look after Feldon. So go. Go!”
“But . . .”
“I’ll get some breakfast into the kids and Feldon and I will see Lily to the bus.”
22
“One wobble over this line,” Lily said, “and the goblins start to burn. Just like flies when you put them under a magnifying glass.”
They were at the bus stop. Lily was pointing with her toe at a squiggle in the dirt by the curb. “But all they want to do is get over that line!”
“Why?” Feldon asked.
It had turned into a brilliant, bright morning, the air cool, the world unusually fresh. None of the snowflakes from last night had lasted.
“Because that’s what you do when you’re a goblin. You try to get over the line!”
The bus pulled up and she climbed on board. She did not look back at Stan or Feldon.
“She wiggles in bed,” Feldon said on the walk home.
Stan picked up his ball at home and took Feldon to the back lot, where he showed his half-brother the basics of the set shot. The ball was too big for Feldon’s hands but he could still bend his elbows and knees properly and line up his shoulders and use the whip-wave of his body to propel the ball high enough — and cock his wrists to spin it after follow-through. The spin was so important.
Stan chased down rebounds and demonstrated different shots. Feldon stayed with it for a while. Then he got distracted by some ants that were staging a battle on a perfect square of ancient patio stone that someone had abandoned near the fence. Red vs. black, millions of them having it out. Feldon squatted to be closer to the action. The battlefield remained precisely within the boundaries of the patio stone. No ants stepped beyond, although they could have — of course they could have.
It looked like the black ants were slightly bigger than the red and were carrying off their opponents’ bodies in surging columns. Eggs were being carried off, too. There beyond the patio stone, in a long line that Feldon followed. Stan sat on his basketball and listened to his explanation.
“Goblins are waiting for them in the cracks. That’s why they stay on the square. Except the egg line. Goblins hate eggs.” He said it like a future neurosurgeon.
People were going to listen to Feldon, Stan thought. People might never believe Lily, but Feldon they would listen to.
And Kelly-Ann was coming any moment now to take Feldon away. The thought came to Stan suddenly, like sitting on a bruise he’d forgotten.
“Your mother is coming to get you,” Stan said on the walk home.
“When?” Feldon asked.
“Soon, I think.” The basketball fit like the whole world under Feldon’s arm. “But we’re going to stay in touch.”
“Will you come visit?”
“Yup. We’ll just figure out when.”
“And we could go fishing?”
Had Feldon really enjoyed fishing?
“Anything you want. We’re half-brothers. We can do it.”
Stan was going to get his driver’s license soon. He could go visit whoever he wanted.
He wasn’t a kid anymore.
—
At lunch they were dipping soldier fingers of toast into soft-boiled eggs when the phone rang. Feldon had yellow egg yolk dripping from the corner of his mouth, which Stan was about to wipe. Instead he walked to the phone. Probably it was Kelly-Ann, insane with worry about her son.
“Hello,” he said calmly, and tossed Feldon the kitchen rag.
“What are you doing home?” Kelly-Ann said in a very familiar way, as if . . . as if she was actually Janine, not Kelly-Ann.
Stan’s heart bounced like a basketball.
“I’m looking after Feldon.”
“Jason Biggs said you ran out of tryout,” she said. “And you missed biology. Stillwater said anyone absent was going to get zero.”
The test! Stan had completely forgotten.
“Did Biggs say I didn’t miss a shot?”
Feldon munched, munched his toast soldiers. The sun was slanting and even through dirty windows half of Feldon’s face was in shadows, half in bright light.
“What happened?”
So Stan told her all about it, and the rest as well —
his mother, the dramatic day at work. It was like he was back on the ladder again. The world didn’t matter. It was just . . . great to have her to talk to.
“Are you worried about your mom?” Janine asked. “What if she loses her job?”
Stan wasn’t worried . . . because of the way the sun hit the egg yolk that was still on Feldon’s face. It was hard to explain beyond that.
“Whatever happens is just going to happen,” he said. “It’s just a problem.”
“Of course it’s a problem! If your mother loses her income, and your father won’t help any . . .”
