Titan Clash

by Sigmund Brouwer

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  “Neither did I,” Ike said. “So I had a talk with Sheriff Mackenzie. He took me to the junkyard, and we had a closer look at your mom’s car.”

  Ike’s frown got bigger.

  “Jack,” Ike said, “it looks like someone messed with the brakes. That’s why she couldn’t stop in time. That’s why she had to swerve off the road to miss that kid and his bike.”

  chapter eleven

  “Hey, loser, I hear your dad’s in jail.”

  I wasn’t sure I’d heard right. I was on the gym floor, facing the center for the Brookville Barracudas. The crowd noise was high for the opening tipoff of the midweek game.

  Their center—Number 15—was a little taller than I am, with a shadow of dark fuzz on his face. He curled his lips up in a sneer, showing more gums than teeth.

  “So,” he said in answer to my puzzled squint, “what’s it like to be the son of a jailbird?”

  “Why you—” I began to snarl.

  The referee tossed the ball into the air. I got caught flatfooted, and Number 15 easily knocked the ball behind him to his teammate.

  The crowd groaned slightly. Before I could react to not reacting, the Barracudas had moved the ball ahead, passing around me and attacking us with a full-court press. By the time I caught up to the play, they’d scored an easy bucket.

  I could see frowns on some of my teammates faces. Expressions that said they had no idea what I was doing but I’d better get into the game.

  We moved the ball back up the court.

  Just inside their zone, I took a pass. I backed up, drawing Number 15 toward me. I kept backing up. My body moved automatically; my mind was still focused on my anger.

  What Number 15 didn’t know was that he’d made a mistake.

  When I get mad, I don’t do stupid things. Ever since I was a little kid, my dad has drilled me about keeping my temper. An outburst is the thing he puts up with the least. If I lose my temper, he finds a way to remind me not to do it again, whether it’s by making me do extra chores or by grounding me. Long ago I learned to take my anger and bottle it up inside. Then I let it out slowly and use it.

  “Does that make you a jailbird loser too?” Number 15 taunted me. “Did good old Dad teach you how to rip people off?”

  Now that his insults weren’t catching me off guard, I could keep my head in the game.

  It was time to let my anger out slowly.

  Although, like most basketball players, I have a bunch of moves I use in different situations, I believe a player should try to develop the Move, something that sets him apart.

  Like Shaquille O’Neal. He uses his size to back in as he dribbles, ramming the defending center closer and closer to the net as he keeps the ball in front and out of reach. When Shaq is close enough, he hooks one leg around his opponent as he spins toward the hoop, at the same time bringing the ball up to slam dunk it like a sledgehammer driving a thumbtack.

  Shaq’s move works nearly every time. You can see it coming, but Shaq is so quick for a man so big that the other player really has no chance.

  And that’s the first thing about the Move. Just like Shaq’s move, it has to work even after every coach in the league has warned his players about it.

  The second thing? The Move has to lead to points. A center court Move doesn’t mean anything to the game and is just a waste of time. Sports highlights on television never show a Move that misses the basket.

  But even if the Move works nearly every time, and even if it usually leads to points, it’s not the Move if it doesn’t look good. If it’s something big and awkward like some tall, tall guy just laying in fadeaway jumpers because no one has his reach, it doesn’t count as the Move. But say someone is low-posting it and spins so quickly the defender looks like a dead elephant, and people gasp—that’s the Move.

  And I had one I worked hard on, every game. It was one I had seen Allen Iverson, a Philadelphia 76er, do time and again on television. It was one built for my biggest strength: quick hands.

  I was ready to try it now. Number 15 was in front of me, guarding my move to the center lane.

  All I did was start working toward him. I began to do crossover dribbles, switching from my right hand to my left hand to my right hand. Still slowly walking.

  “Hey, yahoo,” I said to Number 15, “here’s the deal.”

  I spoke low, so only he could hear me.

  “I’m going to do this to you about twenty times tonight, maybe more if I get the ball a lot.”

  “Do what?” He made a quick stab for the ball with his right hand. I backed up with the ball.

  “Watch closely,” I said. “Maybe you’ll figure it out. If not, you’ll have plenty of chances to learn it.”

  I advanced toward him again. Ball to the left hand. To the right hand. To the left hand, walking slow enough to drive him nuts. Slow enough that he lost his patience.

  He committed to my left side, going for the ball on what he thought was my weaker hand. As he did, I rolled the ball over to the right, almost palming it in a quick move that left him too far forward. And just like that I was around him into the open lane. Halfway through my lay-up, I dumped the ball with a short underhand pass to Chuck Murray, who casually rose with it and pumped it into the net off the backboard.

  As I jogged backward up the court, I grinned at Number 15.

  “At the end of the night,” I said, “let’s see who’s the loser.”

  I slowly fed off my anger all night. Every second or third time I came down the court, I announced to Number 15 that he should watch closely. That he should get ready to have his shorts tangled.

  And every time, I beat him. Not always for baskets, because their coach started to send someone in to double-team me. But when I didn’t have a chance at the net myself, I always found someone open.

  Best of all, Number 15 began to get some of the medicine he had tried to give me to throw off my game. He began to lose his temper.

  By the third quarter, we were up by twenty points. I blew past him again, and he fouled me.

  I made both free throws. And then all the others as he fouled me again and again. His coach finally benched him.

  We won easily. And I walked off the court with a feeling of angry satisfaction. I enjoyed keeping it inside, because with it there, I had no room for my worries.

  That’s why I was smiling when Coach Buckley called to me in the locker room and asked me to join him in his office. I’d played a good game, we’d won, and I felt great about finding a way to stop Number 15 without losing my temper.

  My smile disappeared in a big hurry when Coach told me why he wanted to speak to me alone.

  He was cutting me from the team.

  chapter twelve

  “Cut,” I said, repeating the word. “Cut?” My mind struggled with the concept.

  On the plain white walls of his office, Coach Buckley had photos of all his previous teams. Small trophies held down piles of papers on his desk. In my confusion, it was all a blur.

  “Cut, like gone from the team cut?” I said.

  Coach Buckley kept nodding. His eyes would not meet mine.

  Outside the office, I heard the buzz of the crowd as people left the school. It was always like that. Like air slowly escaping from a balloon, the excitement level in the gym dropped as people left. Soon all that would remain was an echoing gym and the empty paper cups and other trash that littered the stands. I knew because there were times when I wandered back into the empty gym and stood there alone to think over a game.

  But if I was truly gone from the team, I would never have that experience again. All my memories would be tainted.

  Cut?

  “Coach,” I said, hardly able to speak. “Why? I mean the game I just played...”

  “This has nothing to do with your ability,” he said, staring at a pen on his desk.

  “Then why?” I asked. “Is this some kind of bad joke? You know that if I can’t play basketball, I do
n’t have a chance at a scholarship.”

  I waited for him to smile and explain that it was just a bad joke.

  He didn’t.

  “Why?” I repeated.

  Coach Buckley began to shuffle some papers on his desk. “Everyone on this team is subject to the same rules and conditions. The high school charter says that—”

  “High school charter?” I echoed.

  “Yes,” he said, irritated, “charter. The set of founding rules. This high school was built in 1914. Its founding rules state that athletes can play on school teams subject to acceptable moral behavior.”

  Moral behavior? Like whether a person was good or bad?

  Because the biggest thing on my mind was that my dad was in jail, I guessed the coach was judging us both.

  “My dad is innocent!” I said, standing and beginning to lose my temper in spite of myself. “And how dare you decide that what he’s charged with has anything to do with my behavior!”

  Coach Buckley kept shuffling his papers. He didn’t respond. I suddenly felt stupid standing in front of him. I snapped my mouth shut and sat down again.

  “It’s not your dad,” he said. “It’s your friend, Tom.”

  “What?”

  “Under the founding rules, if an athlete is deemed to associate with undesirable characters, he—”

  I couldn’t help myself. I stood up again. “Are you saying that Tom is undesirable? Like he’s a criminal?”

  “You must remember his prank with the net and the pigeons. And I heard about the toilet seat thing. And that’s just this week. There’ve been fireworks, baking soda pranks and let’s not forget that little incident with a gorilla suit.”

  “Let me get this straight,” I said, reining in my anger. “I’ve been hanging out with this guy since kindergarten, and now, today, after playing on this team for more than three years, you decide that our friendship breaks the high school charter.”

  Coach Buckley dropped his papers. He stood and faced the wall away from me. Without looking at me, he spoke. “You can look at it that way if you want. But the final result is the same. You can no longer play on the team.”

  I had a lot of things I wanted to say to Coach Buckley. None of them would have helped the situation.

  I kept my mouth shut. My brain kept working, though. My dad is in jail, I thought. My mom is in the hospital. I can no longer play the sport I love. My scholarship chances have just disappeared. And with the hospital bills mounting, there’s no way to pay for college tuition.

  Was there anything else?

  Oh yeah. Death threats on the answering machine.

  I almost wanted to laugh, it was so pitiful.

  I stared at Coach Buckley’s back. He was giving me such a lame excuse, I knew what this was really about. My dad. Principal Black had warned me about how people might react.

  Maybe if I made a big stink about getting cut, someone would try to help. Like Principal Black or some of my teammates’ parents. After all, I was pretty good. People liked it when I helped the Titans win. But if I made a big stink, people would know I had been cut because of my dad.

  Coach Buckley kept talking to the wall. “Believe me, Jack,” he said. “I have no choice. You have to go.”

  He was right. I wasn’t going to bring more shame on my dad by giving people another excuse to talk about him. So for me, there was no choice. I turned and walked out.

  chapter thirteen

  Everyone from the team had left the locker room by the time I got there. The room was empty except for Tom Sawyer.

  “Hey,” he said as I walked in. Big grin. Big freckles.

  “Hey back,” I said.

  “I’ve been waiting for you. Good game,” he said.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Actually,” he said, “great game. I mean you left a couple of guys hanging on to thin air. You went through them like a hot knife through butter. And that jumper at the end of the game. Man! Talk about a gut check.”

  “Thanks,” I said. His excitement about the game only made things worse for me.

  He suddenly caught my mood and stopped talking.

  I went and showered. When I got back, he was still waiting.

  “I’m thinking,” Tom said, “we should go do something fun. I mean, by now you must be feeling like those pigeons have zeroed in on you for target practice, again...and again...and again.”

  That brought a smile to my face. “Just because my mom’s in the hospital and my dad’s in jail?” I asked sarcastically.

  I couldn’t bring myself to tell him Coach had cut me from the team. That would have made it real. For now I wanted to pretend that Coach had not called me into his office.

  “Yeah,” he said, “something like that. And because your lower lip is dragging so bad you might trip over it.”

  He was trying to make me laugh again. I could tell by the tone of his voice. Instead I began to get mad. Not at him. At life. He had reminded me of how all the bad things were beginning to pile up.

  “It’s got a reason to drag,” I said, feeling an unfamiliar sensation begin to fill my stomach. I work hard to not lose my temper, but I didn’t feel like fighting it now. My words came out through clenched teeth. “I...don’t...deserve... this...”

  My anger swept over me like fire feeding on dead grass. I knew what was going to happen as I stepped toward a locker. But that didn’t stop me. I loved every raging moment as I swung at the lockers. I brought my hand down from above my head as if I was swinging a hammer. Even in my anger, I wasn’t dumb enough to punch out from my waist so that my knuckles hit first. I didn’t want to hurt myself. I just wanted to pound out some of my anger.

  So I hit the locker—hard.

  I loved the impact of my fist against metal. I loved the loud bang. I loved the dent I made. And, briefly, I loved the pain that shot up my arm.

  But only briefly.

  I blinked back tears, shuddered at the pain and cradled my right hand with my left. My anger was gone, but it had probably left behind a broken knuckle. I could barely move the pinkie of my right hand.

  “Ouch,” I said in a small voice.

  Tom stared at me with his eyes wide.

  “It wasn’t you,” I told him quickly. My teeth were still clenched. Not from anger now, but from pain. “Just a bunch of things.”

  My hand really hurt. “And I thought life couldn’t get any worse. But it has.”

  I tried to grin. “I don’t think I can use this hand to shift. Can you take me to the hospital?”

  chapter fourteen

  The parking lot had long since emptied, which was good. My knuckle and pinkie finger were throbbing so badly I’m not sure I would have been able to talk to anyone about the game.

  Tom’s car was a bright blue Mustang, an older model he had bought cheap and fixed up himself. He loved that car and kept it shiny and clean, inside and out. So when we got in, I immediately noticed the small piece of yellow paper on the passenger side floor.

  “Call the cops,” I said, reaching for it with my left hand. “Someone littered in your car.”

  “Fell from the dash,” Tom said, firing up the engine. “It’s a notice to pick something up at the post office.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Dumb question,” he answered. “How will I know what it is until I pick it up?”

  “Maybe you ordered something,” I said. “The question wasn’t that dumb.”

  “Coming from a guy who’s probably just busted his own hand, I think dumb is still the word that fits best.”

  He had a point.

  I didn’t say much as Tom drove us toward the hospital. Every bump in the road seemed to make the throbbing of my hand worse.

  “I don’t suppose,” I finally asked without hope, “that you have any aspirin in the car?”

  In his white lab coat, gray-haired Doc Tremblay was tall and thin. Doc had not only brought me into the world, but about twenty years before that, he had also delivered my father and m
other. It wasn’t something I was likely to forget; Doc reminded me every time I saw him.

  I caught the faint smell of Old Spice aftershave as he leaned over me to inspect my hand.

  “We’ll wait for the X-ray results, of course,” he said. “But either way, broken or not, we should splint it so you don’t cause more damage. If it’s not broken, we can take the splint off much earlier.”

  Doc straightened. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and his eyes pierced me like eagle’s eyes as he asked his next question. “How did this happen, Jack? I don’t recall seeing you get injured during the basketball game.”

  Doc, of course, had been at the game. Here in the emergency clinic, he’d been talking about the game almost nonstop as he looked at my hand.

  “How did it happen?” I repeated.

  “This have anything to do with your friend Tom?” Doc had known Tom a long time too. And he’d seen Tom sitting with me in the waiting room.

  “No,” I said, “not really.”

  “Not really?”

  “I lost my temper.” There was no point in trying to hide it from Doc. “I punched a locker.”

  “Not too smart,” he said, grinning. “But better a locker than a person.”

  “Like I’d do that,” I said. “You know me better than that.”

  “You never know,” Doc answered. “When your dad was your age, he had quite a temper.”

  “Right,” I said. “And the sky is green.”

  “Ask him about it some time,” Doc said as if Dad were waiting for me at home. “More than once I had to stitch him up after he got into a fight.”

  “Are you serious?” I said. “My dad? Mr. Accountant?”

  “All I’m going to say is you should ask him about it some time. Young people tend to forget that their parents were once young too.”

  Doc’s face softened. “This is all pretty rough on you, isn’t it?”

  “Mom in the hospital and Dad in jail, you mean?”

  Doc nodded. “It’s a safe guess that you lost your temper because you’re under tremendous stress. It’s not good for you to just pretend everything is all right. Long term, keeping things like that inside can literally kill a person—heart attacks, strokes. Healthy emotions help bodies stay healthy.”