by David Archer
Time also passes, and both kids were growing like weeds. Within just a couple of years, Chance was as tall as his grandfather, and almost as strong. Robin was almost seven, and was helping their grandmother in the kitchen and with all the housework every day, but their grandparents were wise enough to know that they still needed to be children. Every now and then, they would put a stop to the work and get the kids involved in some sort of game or play. They were lucky enough to have other kids close to their ages on nearby farms, and Chance was good enough with a horse that he was allowed to saddle up Old Jonas, the stud, and take Robin down the road to visit their friends.
It was the following year, when Chance was twelve years old, that Grandpa had a stroke. The doctors thought he was going to die for a short time, but the stubborn old man refused to give up. He had lost the use of both legs and his right arm, and his left arm wasn’t as cooperative as he would like, but his insurance bought him an electric wheelchair that let him get around pretty well.
Of course, it also meant he was trapped inside the house, so Chance went out to the barn early one morning and scrounged out some lumber that wasn’t needed for anything else. By lunch time, he had built a fully serviceable ramp out the back door, and Grandpa laughed like a fool as he drove the chair up and down it, then cruised around the yard.
Chance figured out quickly that he was going to be taking over the work, but Grandpa had already taught him to drive the tractor the year before. He knew how to run the plow, the sickle bar mower, the hay baler and the other equipment. He could plow the ground and Robin would follow along planting seeds, and the two of them would work hard alongside Grandma to keep the weeds out. Come harvest time, Grandpa would be out there running his chair between the rows, watching as they pulled up the carrots, potatoes, cabbage and such, as they picked the tomatoes and beans and corn. And then, when harvest was finished, Chance would hook up the old manure spreader, fill it up with horse droppings and spread it over the fields, then plow it under in preparation for the following spring.
Tractors break down, and other equipment wears out. Grandpa’s veterans pension wasn’t a lot of money, and the farm crops were for their own consumption, but Chance quickly gained a reputation for knowing his horseflesh. At thirteen years old, he was breaking and training the yearlings, and the Reddick horses had a good reputation. These were workhorses, but there was a surprisingly good market for them throughout Kentucky and Tennessee. People came from all over the region to see what horses Chance might have available. He would quote a price, and then refused to budge off it until, by the time he was fourteen, people were literally buying horses from him over the phone. Chance would load the horse into their rickety old trailer, and then Grandma would drive the truck to go deliver it.
Grandma often commented that whenever money was running low and the bills were getting tight, the good Lord would always send somebody to buy a horse. Chance agreed, and the extra money the horses brought made the difference for the family quite often.
Of course, Grandpa insisted that Chance take some money for himself out of every sale. Chance would put his earnings in the bank, spending very little of it, other than giving himself and Robin an allowance. When he finally got up the nerve to ask about that old Chevy pickup, he had enough money in the bank to buy the parts he needed to put it on the road again.
“Chance,” Grandpa said one day, as he was sitting in the barn watching the boy rebuild the old Chevy’s carburetor, “I don’t know why you don’t just go buy a new one. They ain’t that expensive, are they?”
“No,” Chance said, “but this one’s not in that bad a shape. It was just dried out, and carburetor rebuild kits are a lot cheaper than carburetors. Some new gaskets, floats and jets were all it needed. Why spend the money if I don’t have to?”
The old man smiled at him. “Good,” he said. “Don’t ever forget that, and it’ll stand you well the rest of your life. Don’t ever spend money you don’t have to spend, son, and you’ll probably never go broke.”
Chance grinned. “You been telling me that all my life,” he said. “Did you think I wasn’t listening?”
Working in his spare time, it had taken him most of the year to get the old truck running good and solid enough to be on the road. When he turned fifteen, he started driving it around the country roads, and the local police would simply wave if they happened to see him. By that time, he was already on the high school basketball team, and starting to make a name for himself. They even looked the other way once or twice when he drove the truck to school, but he was careful not to make a habit of it until he got his license at sixteen.
Chance had discovered girls way back in junior high school, and had even taken a couple out on dates. That became a more regular, and noticeably more expensive, thing once he had his driver’s license. He dated a few of the cheerleaders, and came to the conclusion that most of them were more interested in themselves than in him, so he gave up on the flashy girls and started paying attention to the ones who had been his friends when they were younger.
He and Sherry Hobbs went steady for a while, but Chance wasn’t always as available as Sherry wanted him to be. After a couple of months, she put him back into circulation and moved on to Larry Gordon, the star quarterback of the football team. Chance didn’t mind; Cindy Bailey had been flirting with him, and her flirting seemed to have more promise in it than Sherry’s did.
Life was pretty good, overall.
THREE
“Chance,” Grandpa said one morning, shortly after Chance had turned sixteen. “Your buddy Mike called while you were out last night, and said the two of you were supposed to go hunting this weekend?”
“It’s deer season, Grandpa,” Chance said. “I already got my license, and I know how much you love venison. I wish he’d kept his mouth shut, though, because I was hoping to surprise you.”
“Well, you might be glad he didn’t. See, I’ve been thinking about something a lot lately, and this sort of told me what to do about it.”
Chance looked up at the old man. “Thinking about something? What do you mean, Grandpa?”
“Well, you know your daddy and I used to go hunting all the time,” the old man said. “When him and your mama died, and we went and got all the stuff out of the house you were living in, I brought back his guns and all his hunting gear. I was just thinking a couple weeks ago that I ought to give it all to you, so I reckon now is as good a time as any.”
He grabbed the joystick and spun his chair around, motioning with his head for Chance to follow. They went into the living room, where Grandpa had his gun cabinet. He fished the key out of his shirt pocket and handed it to Chance.
“Open up the cabinet,” he said. “It’s the Browning on the left. That was your daddy’s favorite hunting rifle.”
Chance opened the cabinet and took out the rifle. He held it for a long moment, just looking it over, and then put his eye to the scope that was mounted on its top. He pointed the rifle toward the kitchen and grinned when he realized he could read the small print on the back of the bag of sugar that was sitting on the counter.
“Seriously, Grandpa? I can have this one?”
“You can. Of course, it needs a good cleaning. It hasn’t been touched since I put it in there, so it’s full of dust and probably cobwebs. There might even be a little spider down the barrel. Go on, get out the cleaning kit and let’s see if you know what to do.”
Grandpa had taken him hunting a couple of times before the stroke, and he had even required Chance to clean the guns afterward. Chance had shot his first buck when he was only ten, and had taken a couple more over the next two years. The hunting had come to a halt, however, when Grandpa was no longer able to go.
Carefully, Chance disassembled the rifle and cleaned every part. He oiled it properly, wiping off the excess the way he’d been taught, and then put it all back together.
“There’s a box of ammunition for it in there,” Grandpa said. “Get it, and let’s go see if you
can shoot that thing.”
Chance rounded up some old tin cans from the trash and set them up on the fence rail, about 100 yards away from where Grandpa had parked his chair. When he got back beside the old man, he loaded the five round magazine and snapped it into the rifle, worked the bolt to chamber a round and then put the crosshairs of the scope on the first of the cans. He concentrated on his target for a moment, then held his breath and squeezed the trigger.
The bullet went high and to the right. Chance made a slight adjustment to the scope, then chambered another round and tried again. This time, the old spinach can went flying off into the weeds beyond the fence.
He made another slight adjustment, then shot the next target. Like its predecessor, it flew off into the wilds, and then Chance fired three more shots as quickly as he could. A tin can went flying with each one, and he turned to his grandfather with a grin spread across his face.
“What do you think? Think I can handle it?”
The old man smiled. “I never doubted you could,” he said. “I just wanted you to take good care of it, that was all. Now, take it back inside and clean it again. You need to learn right now to treat your gun as good as you treat your wife, because the better you treat her, the more she will do for you. If I never taught you nothing else, I want you to learn to treat a woman and a gun with the proper respect they deserve.”
Chance smiled, but he nodded gravely. “You ain’t got to worry, Grandpa. I’ve been watching you and Grandma for years, and I see how much the two of you love each other. If I ever get married, that’s exactly how I want it to be.”
“Then I’ve done my job.”
The hunting trip was a lot of fun, and became the first of many. Just about anytime there was an open season on anything, Chance and one of his buddies would be out there. There was always a good supply of venison and wild boar in the area, and Chance invested in other guns so that he could hunt rabbits, ducks and geese. His grandmother claimed that he was saving her a small fortune on their grocery bill every year, just with the meat he put on their table.
And he was good at it. Chance seemed to have a natural skill for tracking, and he could almost always predict the best place to watch for the big bucks, or the big boars. He even won a couple of trophies at the county fair, one for biggest buck, and one for the sixteen point rack he took when he was seventeen.
That was also the second year that the basketball team went to the state championship, and the second year they lost. It wouldn’t have been quite so devastating except that they had gone undefeated for the entire basketball season, only to lose the final game that would have made them state champions.
“Disappointment is something that comes with life,” Grandpa had told him when he got home after the game. “You have to learn to roll with it, or it will eat you alive. How do you think I felt when I had the stroke? You think I want to sit in this motorized monstrosity? Son, I want to run through the woods with you, I want to be there when you shoot those big deer. This was a big disappointment, and if I had let it, it probably would’ve put me in an early grave. That’s why I refused to give up, because I knew that I still had things to teach you. I’m not going anywhere anytime soon, not if I have any say about it. And you, you need to shake off this disappointment and start thinking about what you’re going to do next.”
Chance sat there looking down at the table for a moment, then slowly grinned. He raised his eyes to meet his grandfather’s and said, “Then I’m going to start figuring out how to win the championship next year.”
The old man nodded. “That’s exactly right,” he said. “The lesson you need to learn from disappointment is that you never, ever give up. The day you give up, that’s the day you begin to die.”
Robin was still a little girl, and still enjoyed playing with her friends, while Chance was starting to feel and act more like an adult. He was still working at the farm, and still maintained his reputation in the horse market, but he had developed other interests, as well. Not all of them were focused around girls, however; there were many, many evenings that saw him coming in late after helping a friend fix something that was broken, or rebuild the engine in his car. He had a knack for things mechanical, and on more than one occasion had been called by other local farmers to help fix a tractor or combine. They always tried to pay him, but Chance would only ask them to pass the favor along to someone else when they could.
Finally, he reached his senior year. When the basketball season began, Chance was almost in heaven. He was determined to lead his team to the championship that year, and even the coach was amazed at how he pushed himself and the other players to improve.
Once again, they were undefeated throughout the entire season. Other teams grew nervous at the thought of playing against Silver Bell, and yet it was hard to shake the superstitious feeling that history was simply going to repeat itself. With every game they won, the rumors would spread anew that they were only going to suffer yet another disappointment at the big championship game.
“Boys,” the coach said as they were preparing to take the court for the championship. “This is the third time we’ve been here in three years, but it’s the first time I’ve ever seen all of you as ready to claim that championship as you are tonight. I know we’ve been disappointed in the past, and it’s still possible we’re going to be disappointed tonight, so I just want to say one thing. No matter what happens tonight, you are, each and every one of you, a champion in my eyes. I know that I speak for the whole town when I say that, so what I really want you to do tonight is get out there and play basketball. Don’t worry about the scoreboard, don’t worry about winning or losing, don’t worry about what anybody else thinks. Just play basketball. It’s a game, remember? And games are supposed to be fun. Let’s get out there and have some fun, how about it?”
The rest of the team broke into applause, but Chance got to his feet. “Coach,” he said, “with all due respect, sir, I’m gonna call BS. We don’t want to go out there and have fun; we want to go out there and kick some ass. We want to go out there and take the championship, and bring it back to Silver Bell where it belongs. Am I right, guys?”
This time, they cheered. The coach grinned and bowed to Chance, and the team ran onto the basketball court.
They were playing against the Pikeville Panthers, the same team that had beaten them two years in a row. Just like the Rangers, the Panthers had been undefeated throughout the season. This was the battle of dinosaurs, the game that was for all the marbles, and both sides were determined to win.
From the moment the game began, it seemed almost more like a tennis match than a basketball game. Each time one team scored, the other would follow up with a matching score. At the end of each quarter, the score was tied, and it was tied up again as they approached the final buzzer. The Panthers were up by one point, and they seemed to have turned on some sort of secret weapon offense. Every time the Rangers got the ball, one of the Panthers was there to take it away, and it was all the Rangers could do to get it back.
The clock was ticking down, and the Panthers had the ball. They weren’t even trying to score, because the clock had less than fifteen seconds to go. They were passing the ball back and forth amongst themselves, just keeping it away from the Rangers as they waited for the clock to run out completely.
In the stands, the fans began counting down.
Ten…
Nine…
Eight…
And that’s when Chance managed to make an incredible leap into the air and catch the ball as it was passed from one Panther to another. He landed on his feet and was instantly surrounded by opposing players, as the countdown dropped below five seconds.
There was no way he could get past the Panthers that were guarding him, so he simply leapt into the air once more and threw the ball as hard as he possibly could. It was a desperate shot, the kind that stood only a million to one chance of going into the basket, and the ball was still in the air when the final buzzer sounded. The en
tire auditorium was holding its breath, because as impossible as it seemed, that ball almost appeared to be on a perfect trajectory.
It had gone high up into the air, but gravity took its toll and it began coming down. It was still moving toward the basket, but the rate of descent was fast enough for all of the Silver Bell fans to begin to groan.
The ball struck the rim of the basket, bounced off and hit the backboard, and then dropped right through the center of the net. The scoreboard began flashing, and the Silver Bell side of the auditorium erupted into the wildest cheers the building had ever heard.
Silver Bell had won the state championship, and Chance Reddick had made the impossible winning shot.
FOUR
Pretty much everyone figured it was that shot that brought the KSU recruiter to town. All of the sportscasters claimed that they could not remember ever seeing a shot like that in any championship game, and many of them predicted that Chance Reddick might one day have a career in professional basketball.
Chance laughed at that idea. He wasn’t the type who could be a professional athlete, because, in his opinion, most of them were about as worthless as they could be. He couldn’t imagine taking ridiculous amounts of money just for going out on the court and playing basketball.
He could, however, handle the thought of letting it pay for his education. Once the men from the church convinced him that they would be there for his grandparents and his sister, Chance finally accepted the scholarship.
That summer after his first year, he became reacquainted with Silver Bell, and noticed a few changes. Bradley Toler, the man who owned the big chicken plant over at Pikeville, had bought a large piece of land just outside of town and was putting up a new plant. Chance knew that the town could certainly stand to have some new jobs come in, so it looked like a pretty good thing from his point of view. He even considered the possibility that a plant like that might need an engineer, one of these days. He certainly wouldn’t be bashful about applying, when the time came.
