No Slam Dunk

by Mike Lupica

  “He’s not here,” she said. “And you still haven’t told me who you are.”

  “My name is Anthony Phillips,” he said. “Lieutenant Davies knew me as Chief Petty Officer Phillips.”

  He came up the sidewalk, and for a second, before he stuck out his hand, Wes thought he might salute.

  He was tall and young-looking and had the same kind of short, scruffy beard as Mr. Correa. Wes thought he looked big enough to have been a football player.

  “This was the only address I had for him,” he said to Wes’s mom.

  “Why are you looking for him?” she said.

  The young guy said, “I wanted to thank him for something.”

  “Thank him for what, if you don’t mind me asking?” Christine Davies said.

  “For saving my life,” Chief Petty Officer Anthony Phillips said.

  He shook Wes’s hand now.

  “You must be his boy,” Anthony Phillips said. “He used to talk about you all the time, what a great basketball player and an even better kid.”

  “You want to thank my dad for saving your life?” Wes said.

  “I never did it right when we were together,” Phillips said. “That man is a hero.”

  Wes stared at him and said, “You know what happened.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I sure do.”

  Wes’s mom asked him to please come inside with them.

  As they walked together toward the front door, Phillips said, “Will the lieutenant be along?”

  “No,” Wes’s mom said.

  She took out her key and unlocked the door. As she did, Wes was thinking that maybe the door wasn’t the only thing that would be unlocked today.

  At last.

  Wes and Petty Officer Phillips followed her inside. It took Petty Officer Phillips a long time to tell the story about what happened to them and their unit that day. It involved a place called Kabul in Afghanistan, and it involved Navy SEALs fighting, as Wes knew they did, against the Taliban.

  “We were supposed to be advising and assisting at the time,” Petty Officer Phillips said. “But it wasn’t very long before we were doing a lot more than that. We were protecting and we were proud to do it.

  “Your dad was our leader. He always maintained his cool, especially under pressure,” Phillips said. “We all looked up to him. But one of the guys in our unit was a hothead. Jake was his name, Jake Thompson. Jake looked up to your dad, too, but he sometimes acted like he was playing a video game and the lieutenant had to remind him to calm down. It’s not easy, being over there. I don’t blame Jake. He was just dealing with the danger and the stress like the rest of us. But he and your dad, they sometimes butted heads.”

  Wes watched Petty Officer Phillips as he spoke. Watched how carefully he was picking his words, as if he wanted to tell the story exactly right. He was taking his time, telling it at his own speed.

  “There came a day when we unexpectedly found ourselves in a hot spot. Our radios were down and we didn’t know that a group of rebels was in the area. There we were, surrounded by fighters in Humvees and jeeps, badly outnumbered and no way to call for backup.”

  Petty Officer Phillips took a deep breath. His eyes seemed to be watching something that wasn’t there. Then he continued.

  “Jake decides on his own to create a diversion. There was this lone Humvee, separate from the others on the perimeter, rocket launchers on the back of it. Jake figured if he could get to it, he could provide cover for the rest of the unit. Maybe buy time until Special Forces got there.

  “Your dad, he was in charge of keeping everyone alive, so he tells Jake to stand down. If anyone is going to risk his life to get them out of there, it would be him. Jake wasn’t having it, though. He makes off to the Humvee. He takes out the two Taliban guys operating it and climbs in back to where rocket launchers are. That was as far as he got before taking a bullet. The gunfire had given him away and he was a sitting duck out there.

  “That’s when Lieutenant Davies tells me and the others in the unit to cover him. He wants to get Jake’s body, won’t let it stay with the Taliban. Trouble is, everyone knows we’re there now so the element of surprise is gone. Didn’t matter to your dad. He runs like a dart out to that Humvee, no fear. The rest of us, we had his back. He lifts Jake onto his shoulders like he weighs nothing and makes it all the way back to the unit, automatic fire kicking up dirt all around him. By that point, Special Forces arrives in a copter. The lieutenant orders the rest of us to get on board. There’s too much weight for all of us to escape, though, and no time to argue. Your dad, he stays behind and single-handedly fights off the Taliban until the copter can return to get him. He took a bullet in the leg just as he was climbing on board. But I guess you already know that part.”

  Wes and his mom were silent. Wes’s heart was beating fast. He looked at his mom. She had tears running down her face.

  “Like I said, Lieutenant Davies is a hero. Yet all he could talk about was how he had lost a man, how he’d let down Jake.”

  Wes finally found his voice. “That’s what Dad was talking about that day I found him in the park,” he said. “I didn’t understand what he meant at the time. But as he walked away, he said that being a team guy wasn’t supposed to get people killed.”

  Now he knew why, and how, his dad had been dying a little bit at a time ever since he got back from Afghanistan.

  That’s what had been killing him.

  THIRTY-THREE

  BEFORE PETTY OFFICER PHILLIPS LEFT, he gave them his phone number, his email address, and his home address in Bethesda. He said he still wanted to see Wes’s dad and thank him in person for saving his life. When Wes’s mom explained what Lt. Michael Davies had been like since coming back from Afghanistan, Petty Officer Phillips said, “We have to do for him what he did for us.”

  “Wes and I feel the same way,” Christine Davies said.

  “I want to be there for him,” Phillips said. “And if the rest of the guys who served with him knew what he was going through, they’d feel the same way.”

  Wes’s mom smiled.

  “Thank you for your service,” she said.

  Wes knew she said that to every single member of the military she encountered in her life.

  “People say you’re either brave or you’re not,” Phillips said to her. “I’m not so sure about that. I think a lot of what I learned about being brave I learned from your husband.”

  He shook hands with Wes’s mom. Then he did the same with Wes.

  “He’ll be okay,” he said. “He’s got the two of you. He’s got everything inside him that made him lead and the rest of us follow. All he used to talk about was getting back with the two of you. Now he needs to do that again.”

  Petty Officer Phillips left.

  Wes said, “We need to go find Dad right now.”

  “How about we sit down for a second and talk?” she said.

  He followed her into the living room. The two of them sat on the couch, turning till they were facing each other. She took both of Wes’s hands into hers and squeezed them.

  “Now we know for sure why your dad is the way he is,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean we know how to help him put himself back together. He’s still broken. Or at least broken up.”

  “But we have to tell him that nobody blames him for what happened!” Wes blurted out.

  “Your dad knows that in his heart, because he’s too smart not to,” she said. “But admitting that to himself and accepting it are two different things.”

  “Please, Mom,” Wes said. “Please let’s go find him.”

  She was still holding his hands, as if afraid that if she let go, Wes might go running out the front door. But then she surprised him.

  “Okay,” she said.

  She pulled her phone out of the back pocket of her jeans, tapped on it with her index
finger. Held it to her ear. Shook her head.

  “Straight to voice mail,” she said.

  Wes pulled out his own phone and tapped out a text message to his dad:

  Dad. Please call. Important. Wes

  Then he hit send.

  “He hasn’t replied to one of my texts in a long time,” Wes said. “But I have to try.”

  “Let’s take a ride over to his apartment,” she said.

  “What if he’s not there?” Wes said. “Or if he’s there and doesn’t answer the door?”

  “If he doesn’t answer, we’ll stop by the one bar he told me he likes to go to,” she said. “I found him there one time.”

  “You didn’t tell me,” Wes said. “What happened when you did?”

  “It didn’t go well,” she said. “He told me that I didn’t belong, and to please not ever show up there again.”

  “If he’s there today, it will be different,” Wes said.

  “And why is that?”

  “Because I’ll be with you,” Wes said.

  Michael Davies didn’t answer the door at the Woodside Garden Apartments. Wes rang the bell and banged on the door. It was the same as the other time he’d come here. Nothing.

  “Let’s go to the bar,” Wes said.

  “There’s a lot of bars, honey,” she said.

  “Let’s at least try that one,” he said.

  It was called the Fado Irish Pub. They saw the long bar when they got inside, television sets above it showing different college basketball games, and a room with tables apart from the bar area called the Dublin Room, where people were still having lunch.

  Wes and his mom walked around the front room, and then into the dining area. But there was no sign of his dad.

  Before they left, Wes’s mom went up to the bartender, took out her phone, and showed him one of the pictures of Wes’s dad she had on it.

  “I think my husband is in here frequently,” she said.

  The bartender looked at her phone, and smiled.

  “Lieutenant Mike,” he said. “He was in here a couple of hours ago.”

  “Was he drinking?”

  “Cheeseburger and a Coke,” the bartender said. “Didn’t even finish the burger. Said he had to be somewhere.”

  “Did he happen to mention where?” Christine Davies said.

  “Yeah, as a matter of fact he did,” the bartender said. “Him and the other guy said they had to get to their game.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  IN THE CAR, WES SAID to his mom, “Dad had to get to a game? Did he ever mention being on a team?”

  “No,” she said. “And the bartender said he didn’t know the other man.”

  “Maybe he’ll explain it to us the next time we see him,” Wes said. “Whenever that is.”

  So, on a day when one mystery had been solved—what had happened to Lt. Michael Davies in Kabul—another one had taken its place.

  What game? Wes thought.

  Wes sent one more text message to his dad and then gave up. His mom left one more voice-mail message, and then she gave up.

  “When he’s ready to talk, he will,” she said. “We just have to continue to be patient.”

  “I’m about as good at that as I am at talking about stuff,” Wes said.

  It got a smile out of her.

  “Wow,” she said. “That’s not good.”

  “It’s true.”

  “So is something else,” she said. “While we wait for him to be back in our lives, we have to keep living our own.”

  So Wes did that. He went to school. He went to practice. He was always happy to be there, happy that things were so much better with Dinero, even though he thought Dinero was quieter than usual this week, distant not just from Wes, but the other guys on the team, too.

  As they were leaving Thursday night’s practice Wes said to him, “You okay?”

  Maybe I can talk about stuff, Wes thought, as long as it’s not about me.

  “Yeah,” Dinero said. “All good.”

  “You sure?”

  “Just a little jammed up with school stuff,” Dinero said.

  “Anything I can do to help?” Wes said.

  Dinero smiled, as if what they were talking about was no big deal.

  “Just keep helping me with basketball,” he said. “I gotta handle schoolwork on my own.”

  They were in the lobby of the rec center. They heard the quick burst of a car horn.

  “My dad,” Dinero said. He started to walk across the lobby, then turned and said to Wes, “How are things with your dad?”

  “Same,” he said.

  “Sorry,” Dinero said.

  “Me too,” Wes said.

  Dinero shook his head. “Dads,” he said, and then was gone.

  Emmanuel came up from behind Wes. They were going home with his parents tonight.

  “Something up with the Money Man?” E said.

  “Maybe,” Wes said. “But whatever it is, he didn’t want to talk about it.”

  “Things still cool between the two of you?”

  “Don’t know why they wouldn’t be,” Wes said.

  Sometimes you didn’t know what you didn’t know.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THEIR GAME ON SATURDAY WAS against Prince George’s County, second of the regular season against the Pistons, in their gym, the White Oak Community Rec Center, in Silver Spring.

  There were two games left in the regular season, and the Hawks were still alone in first place. The Pistons were in second, the Montgomery County Grizzlies third, Potomac Valley fourth. The Hawks still had just one loss. But nobody in the group bunched behind them had more than three, so a lot could change with seeding before the top four teams made the league tournament, which would send its champ to the nationals in South Carolina.

  A lot had changed since the start of the season, in Wes’s life and on his team. But the goals were still the same:

  Be the best team.

  Be seen.

  And what better place to be seen, as you got yourself ready for the next level, than at the National Travel Basketball Association tournament?

  But Wes knew better than to get ahead of himself. It was another thing his dad had always drummed into him. Take your eye off the ball and somebody will steal it from you.

  The only thing you could control was the game you were playing. That meant the one today against the Pistons, and their point guard, Tate Brooks, and Matt Riley, the same small forward that Wes had gone up against last time the two teams had played.

  Matt, whose hair looked even redder than Wes remembered it, came over to say hi right before the game started.

  “Our point guard says this game today is gonna be different than it was last time,” he said.

  Wes grinned, bumped him some fist, and said, “Dude, that’s the fun of it. They’re all different.”

  “Things more chill than they were before between you and your point guard?” Matt asked.

  Wes knew he meant chill in a good way.

  “It’s why we’re looking to run hot,” Wes said.

  And the Hawks did run hot from the start, sharing the ball, D-ing up all over the court, fast-breaking every chance they got. Tate was missing his shots. Wes was making Matt miss, forcing him away from his spots, contesting every pass Tate tried to throw to him.

  The Hawks were up by ten points at the end of the first quarter, and by sixteen halfway into the second.

  It happened then, as if somebody had thrown a switch at the White Oak Rec Center.

  The Money Man showed up.

  Just like that, it was as if Dinero’s trip to Wes’s house had never happened. As if the Money Man had never asked Wes to help him become more of a team man. Just like that—and until Coach sat Dinero down—they turned into a one-man team.


  Again.

  Wes thought about what Matt Riley said before the game, about things being chill between him and Dinero. Well, they were now, but in the worst way, because Dinero was freezing out everybody else on the Hawks, except when he needed one of them to be at the receiving end of a hey-look-at-me pass.

  Dinero wasn’t just running hot.

  He was on fire.

  Wes was surprised that it lasted as long as it did, for about three minutes of game time before Coach Saunders had seen enough.

  And the thing of it was, Dinero was extending the Hawks’ lead. He pulled up on a break, and instead of driving to the basket, shot a three. It went in. He threw a no-look pass to Russ, and then another to E. They both made shots. In a blink, he had turned his matchup with Tate Brooks into a complete mismatch. Finally, he took an outlet pass from E, got ahead of everybody, but instead of shooting a straight layup, he bounced the ball off the backboard to DeAndre, and he laid the ball in.

  The next whistle, Coach pulled him.

  Dinero was shocked.

  “You’re taking me out?” he said.

  “As a matter of fact, son, I am,” Coach said.

  “But I can’t miss!” Dinero said.

  He was being too loud now, the way he’d just been way too loud in the game.

  “What you’re missing is the point about what we’re trying to do here,” Coach said, keeping his own voice down. “We’ve had this talk, son. We play as a team.”

  “Scoreboard!” Dinero said, and even pointed at the one closest to them.

  “When I only coach by that,” Coach said, “then I’ll step out the way and let somebody else do this job. Now, turn down the volume and go sit down.”

  “This is so wrong,” Dinero said, almost to himself as much as Coach.

  “Finally,” Coach Saunders said, “we agree on something.”

  The Hawks were still ahead by sixteen points when the first half ended. The second half began with Dinero still on the bench. Josh took over at point guard, but Wes really played as much point as he did. The Hawks went back to sharing the ball, playing the way they had at the start of the game.