Quicks

by Kevin Waltman

  “Maybe,” I say. “But how ‘bout you tell me how things could go easier.”

  Nick takes a long look at me, checking to see if I’m for real. Behind him, everyone else whirs slowly back to their business. And then Nick launches in again, back into lecture mode. I sit and take it.

  Standing here, finger hovering by the doorbell, I truly regret listening to Nick. It’s not that I’m out of my element. Just a few blocks away—Ruckle and 32nd. But I’m not sure I’m ready for what’s on the other side of that door.

  But I promised Nick. So I press the buzzer. At first, there’s nothing—no sound of someone approaching, nobody hollering that they’ll be there in a sec. Around me, the night’s getting cold, and I figure that’s that. Head home before the freeze sets in, before the streets get dangerous. I’m just about to spin and head back up to Patton when the door opens with a gentle whoosh. The man of the house—goatee, glasses, crisp blue button-down and brown cords—stands there, blinking. He seems surprised, like this is the first time anyone’s ever come to their door. But he doesn’t seem nervous—at least not the way any other white guy in the city would act on this corner after dark. “Derrick?” he asks.

  I just nod in response. Behind him, I see his wife relaxing into a chair with a book and a glass of wine. Further back, in the kitchen, the son is clearing dishes. Even though I just saw him, for some reason I feel compelled to ask. “Is Darryl home?”

  Mr. Gibson smiles. “Of course,” he says. He’s a little over-excited, like he’s meeting Darryl’s girlfriend or something. Then again, I bet I’m the first kid from Marion East that’s ever been to this house. He calls over his shoulder. “Darryl, you can leave the rest of the dishes. You have company.” Then he waves me in, shutting the door behind me.

  The place is basically a library squeezed into a refurbished house. In their living room, bookshelves line all four walls. And it’s not for show—you can tell that they’re in constant use. On every row there are books missing, the rest of the stack tilting into the open spaces. In other spots, books jut out for easy access, bookmarks sticking from them. On every coffee table there are more books and magazines scattered—and they’re not the kind of trashy mags that most people snap up in the checkout lane. No, these things look a little deeper. Instead of celebrities on the front, they’ve got pictures of serious-looking people—authors maybe or politicians. One even just has a picture of a prison on the front, the words American Shame written below it in blood red. For all that text scattered around though, the rest of the place looks spotless. The walls look newly painted, the furniture is all dusted, the carpet is vacuumed and free of debris.

  “Well,” Gibson says. He’s standing behind me, like he’s been there for a minute watching me gawk at their place. “What you want?”

  “Darryl,” his mom seethes, looking up from her book. She’s got big glasses that kind of take over her face, but behind them her mousy features seem over-stressed by how tightly her brown hair’s pulled back in a bun. “That’s no way to talk to a friend.”

  Gibson eyes me up and down. “Well, tell me when a friend gets here.”

  “Darryl!” his mom says again. Then she sets her book in her lap and addresses me instead. “I apologize for my son’s horrible hospitality, Derrick,” she says. “I promise you this is not the kind of manners his father and I try to instill.”

  “It’s okay,” I say. “Besides, he’s right. I haven’t been exactly a friend to him.”

  She shakes her head. “Yes, but you’re in our home. It’s his”—she tilts her head toward Darryl—“job to be the host.” Then, as if deciding her son needs a demonstration, she leans forward and starts asking me questions. At first it’s just about school. Subjects I like. Teachers that are tough. Standard parent stuff. Then she surprises me. “Have you decided where you’ll play college ball next year, Derrick?”

  “No,” I answer. “I got it narrowed. But I haven’t decided.”

  “Well, I’ve long been a believer that college athletes should get paid,” she says. She glances toward the kitchen, indicating her husband. “Barrett wrote a long paper on it that should be published in the spring. You really amount to unpaid labor. And it is labor, sometimes more hours than what we would call full-time employment. Just another way the system tries to deny the poor what is rightfully theirs.”

  I about tell her that there are plenty of college athletes who come from way too much money to call themselves poor, but I’m late on the trigger. She keeps rattling on. “So I say if a university is willing to offer you money for your services, you are entirely within your rights to take it. Some might call that cheating, but I honestly believe it’s some small piece of fair compensation.”

  “Jesus, Mom, the guy didn’t come here for that,” Gibson says. “Save it for your classroom.”

  At that, his mom bolts up out of her chair. “Now that’s enough!” she snaps. She’s still under control, but she’s plenty worked up. “This attitude of yours is getting real old, real fast."

  And now I know a couple things I didn’t know five seconds ago. First, despite her frail features and meek face, Gibson’s mom has some fire. And I know that it’s one thing we have in common—our competitive spirit comes from our mother’s side.

  “Let’s just head upstairs, Derrick,” Gibson says. He shuffles off, shoulders slumped in self-pity. I follow.

  His room doesn’t fit with the rest of the house. It’s not just the debris and disarray—that just looks like any teenager’s room. It’s that he’s peppered his walls with pictures of ballers and rappers. The players I get—any self-respecting point guard is gonna slap some pics of Chris Paul and Derrick Rose on his wall. But the rappers? And not just any rappers—these walls are sporting Tech N9ne and Big K.R.I.T. I guarantee you, parents who read the stuff that lined those walls downstairs don’t exactly have an appreciation for the artists lining these walls. All of it under the same roof of a white family on Ruckle and 32nd. Crazy.

  “I’m sorry about my parents, man,” Gibson says. “They think they’ve got to, like, prove to everyone how much they know about black people. It’s stupid.”

  I just raise my eyebrows and point to a few of the posters on his wall. “You sure you talking about your folks?”

  “Man, shut up,” Gibson says. But then he laughs it off. “I been dealing with that stuff my whole life,” he explains. “People saying I’m a wannabe and all that. But you tell me. When your parents got, like, twenty advanced degrees between them and they think it’s a good idea to move to this part of town, am I supposed to listen to, like, Beethoven and shit?”

  “Wait, what?” I say. “You mean your parents could afford to live somewhere else?”

  “Shit,” he says. “We moved here from Bloomington because they both got jobs over at Butler. But are we living on that side of town? Hell, no. They talk all this nonsense about refusing to live in a segregated world. But, man, look around. I feel pretty damn segregated, you know?”

  I have to laugh at that. The kid’s got a point. And I realize that he’s got his problems just like anyone else. We look at each other and he just shakes his head, like explaining the situation just makes it more exasperating to him. “Whatever,” he says, trying to change the subject. “Why you here, anyway?”

  There’s a sour tone to his voice, but I don’t take the bait. He’s already pretty worked up. I can’t pretend like I’ve been welcoming to him. I’ve been lingering near his doorway, but now I take a step into the center of the room. It closes the gap between us, and Gibson suddenly seems pretty small. As if sensing it, he takes a few steps back, clears a couple old school papers off a chair, then points at it for me to sit. I go ahead and take a seat. “We got to get on the same page, man,” I say. I offer it matter-of-factly, looking him right in the eye as I talk.

  For a second, he narrows his eyes at me in distrust. The tension stays in his body. He grinds his teeth a couple times. Then he exhales. He rolls his eyes, but he starts nodding. “
I know it, D. This whole mess between us is nonsense, right?”

  “Right,” I say. “We both want to win. I don’t really care about anything else.”

  Gibson nods. He starts to pace back and forth in his room, getting worked up at the idea. “I know it. So do the rest of the guys on the team, but we have to show them how.”

  “Now you’re talking,” I say.

  Then he stops and looks at me. It’s like seeing me makes him remember how much he’s resented me over the course of the year. His eyes narrow. “Look, I know we’re never gonna be tight. But I’m never gonna freeze you out on the court again, okay?”

  That’s all I wanted to hear. But I know I’ve got to make some kind of pledge to him too. “Cool,” I say. “And I won’t squeeze off shots every time I touch it either.” I want to add even if I do have it rolling, but I just leave it at that. No sense in taking a step backwards now. I offer him a hand. Gibson grabs it and pulls me in to hug it out. We give each other a few thumps on the back and then step away. “We good?” I ask.

  “Yeah, we straight,” he answers. He gazes around his room, then at me again. Neither one of us is sure what to do now. He lets that snarky smile creep across his face, but this time I’m not the target. “I bet if you want, my moms and pops will set you up with a nice long lecture about the exploitation of black people. They dish that shit out like other parents give out milk and cookies.”

  I laugh. “Yeah, I’ll pass,” I say.

  Gibson smiles. “What I thought,” he says. “I bet that’s how their students feel too.” Then we both bolt downstairs. Gibson ushers me to the door before his parents can even react. “Let’s get after it at practice tomorrow,” he says.

  Then we’re done. And as I zip my coat up against the cold night, for the first time in a month I feel like maybe we can make something out of this season yet.

  When it’s your own house, you can feel it the moment you walk in. That silence that’s all wrong. If everyone’s asleep or if the house is empty, that’s silence too, but you know it’s okay. This is different. It’s like the silence of a grave. I walk in that door, see the coats hanging in the open closet. Shoe scattered on the floor. The chairs sit empty, same places they’ve always been in the living room. I scan across the room, toward the kitchen where there’s a light on. My whole family—even Kid, who’s all but vaporized since our falling out—sit quietly by the table. Dad’s giving Grace a bottle, so even she’s quiet, content to feed. When I step toward the kitchen, everyone looks at me. I don’t know what it is, but judging by their faces, it’s bad.

  They glance now at each other, checking to see who should be the one to talk first. Finally Dad hands Grace gingerly over to Mom. Grace fusses for a second, but latches back onto the bottle and quiets again. Dad stands and walks to me. Behind him, I see Kid bury his face in his hands. Even Jayson can’t bear to look now, instead staring off across the kitchen and out the window.

  “We would have texted you,” Dad says, “but this isn’t the kind of thing for a text.”

  “What is it?” I say, getting more anxious with each second they don’t tell me.

  Dad puts his hand on my shoulder. He has to reach up to do it. But in that instant I feel like I’m five again, and Dad’s calming me down from a tantrum. “It’s Wes,” he says.

  “What?” I ask. In my heart, I know.

  “He’s been shot.”

  19.

  It could have been a lot worse. Two inches to the right, and my boy would be a corpse. Instead, the bullet went clean through near his left shoulder. The nurse said Wes was awfully close to bleeding out. Even though I’m sitting just a few feet from him in his hospital bed, all I can picture is him on a cold Indy sidewalk, blood pooling around him. It happens almost every night in this city, but it’s different when the victim is the guy you grew up with. Then it’s not a number or a headline—it’s a life hanging in the balance.

  Outside Wes’ door, an officer sat patiently. He questioned me pretty good before letting me in, but I know he’s really just waiting on Wes to wake up so he can start investigating. Or maybe he doesn’t even care. Maybe he’s just following procedure, checking off items on a list before he can go home and forget about Wes just like this city forgets about everyone else who gets clipped.

  Wes. My boy. We used to kill whole days together running around in the summer—playing hoops at the park when we were so little it was all we could do to heave the ball up to the rim, scrounging money from our moms and then burning through it on candy and hip-hop magazines, busting into vacant apartments and scavenging through what people left behind. Now here he is, his chest rising in ragged breaths. He’s hooked to an I.V. The only sound in the room is the whir and beeping of the hospital equipment. His skin, always a shade lighter than mine, looks pale and waxy from the lost blood. His shoulder is covered in white gauze. With the sheet pulled down a little, I can see his whole left side. Now I see the ink. I knew about the dollar sign he had on the inside of his wrist, but now I see tats crawling up most of his arm—stars and lettering and numbers that I can’t quite decipher. But I know one thing—they’re the markings of a crew.

  I think back to that officer outside the door. Maybe he’s here to investigate who shot Wes. But maybe he’s here to arrest Wes whenever he wakes up. It wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened around here. Wes grunts in his sleep and I lean in, thinking maybe he’s about to say something. His eyelids flutter in a dream, but he stays asleep.

  I think back to a summer day before our sixth grade year. We were at the park, shooting around, when some older kids rode up. They were in high school, all sneer and swagger. Straight off they told us the court was theirs. That was the summer Wes and I really started to separate in size—like he was rooted to the ground while I inched toward the sky a little more every day. So I told those guys if they wanted to run, I’d run with them. But Wes just bowed out. He slinked to the sideline and sat. And that was the last time he ever played ball with me. It’s not like he had all this untapped potential on the court, but now I think back to that day—I hung in there with the older kids, getting some rips and buckets here and there, while Wes lay sprawled in the grass, defeated—and it seems like maybe that was the moment we really started in different directions.

  Or maybe it was our freshman year when his dad stood him up and didn’t visit on Christmas. Or maybe it was sophomore year when he got his head all screwed up over a girl. Or maybe all of that’s oversimplifying things. It’s like the more I try to find a real reason why he’s lying in bed with a gunshot wound and I’m getting scholarship offers, the less any of it makes sense. Are our fates just different because I’m 6’4" and Wes is 5’6"? Is that all there is? Chance?

  I know the deal. I’m supposed to lean over Wes and talk to him. Whisper all kinds of encouraging words that sink in even as he sleeps. But I don’t. It’s not because I’m anxious or anything, but because I just don’t believe in that kind of stuff anymore. Sure, some guys make a turnaround. They get scared straight or find religion or move away and hit reset. But the truth is Wes is on his path, and the vast majority of guys don’t get off of it until they’re locked up or dead. I don’t want that to be the case, but I’m not young enough to pretend anymore.

  One of the nurses said that Wes’ mom was there earlier, but I’ve been here for more than an hour and she’s been a ghost. I know what that means—she took one look at her son and couldn’t handle it. She’s off now, lost in a stream of booze. If not something harder than that. And his dad? Maybe he doesn’t even know yet. Maybe he’ll never know. I imagine him somewhere in the west now, sleeping alone in a dingy apartment. Ignorant of what he’s guilty of. So maybe that’s the real chance—the lottery we enter to determine whether or not we get good parents.

  The door whooshes open slightly. When I turn, all that’s visible at first is a sliver of light coming into the room. Then a hand curls around the door and pushes it open slowly, as if whoever is on the other side is afr
aid to wake Wes up. When the door’s open enough, a head peeks in. Lia. It’s clear she’s been crying. It’s not like she ever knew Wes that well, so I know those tears are for my benefit. She hesitates there, like someone who just stepped into church while the preacher’s in mid-sermon, not sure if they should come on in or just slink away so as not to intrude. “Come on in,” I whisper. “He’s just resting.”

  Quiet as a cat, Lia slinks in. She’s got her arms folded tight around her chest, warming herself against the sterile cold of the hospital. She walks to Wes’ bedside and then stops and stares. She shudders once. I pick up the second chair and set it down for her. She doesn’t sit right away, like she’s afraid to move. I run my hand gently across her back. “It’s okay,” I say.

  Then we sit next to each other in silence. A couple times Lia turns to me, her eyes still glassy. I don’t know if she wants to say something or if she expects me to fill up the silence. But each time she turns her gaze back to Wes, because, really, what is there to say? Finally, she simply reaches out with her right hand and puts it on my knee. There’s nothing sexy about it, just a quiet touch to let me know she’s here for me. I take her hand in mine and we just sit there in silence. Lia and I have had a lot of things go wrong between us, but for now—as the clock creeps toward midnight—we hold steady and keep a quiet vigil for Wes. I guess we’re stand-ins for the couple who should be there instead of us.

  PART III

  20.

  A basketball game now seems obscene. But you’ve got to take what the schedule says. And it’s been there since it came out—Muncie Central on the first Saturday in January. The people of Muncie don’t care that someone shot Wes. All they care about is hoops. They’re decked out in their purple and white, buzzing as the teams warm up. The cheerleaders kick in the air. The concession stands push out bags of popcorn. The band blasts the fight song. And back in Indianapolis, Wes is at home, healing up and refusing to speak—not to the cops, not even to me.