you wish you was a bailer.”
Hard to remember he was playing Madison Square Garden instead of ratball, cold hoopin’ it on busted asphalt.
“Shorteeeeeee!”
The ref was blowing his whistle. Manager was calling time.
“Your mama’s calling,” mocked Shaq. “She back at the fence again, going, ‘Shorteee, Shorteee, Shorteee.’”
Shorty O’Tool screwed his eyes shut and tried with all his might to get back in his zone. But when he listened for the fans it was the trucks and buses on Ninth Avenue that filled his ears. When he opened his eyes the rippling sea of fans in the bleachers had hardened into the housing project walls. Down at his feet, hoping for Nikes on gleaming hardwood, he found tattered sneakers on cracked asphalt.
Shorty walked slowly to the chain-link fence that separated the narrow playground from Ninth Avenue. His mother was standing stiff and scared with the social worker. And there was absolutely no denying that he was still only ten years old and tired to death of running.
The social worker was all his fault. He’d begged and begged his mother could he go to school. No one knew them in this neighborhood. It was safe—the project was surrounded by rich people in fancy houses with iron garden gates and bushes and Christmas wreaths hung on the doors.
School was safe, he pleaded. They’d never look for him in a school with rich kids. Finally his mother relented. And damn if in two days there isn’t a social worker all over his mother bitchin’ that the teacher says Shorty is “depressed.”
The social worker came at him with questions, right through the playground fence. He stared at his sneakers. Water running along the sidewalk smelled of fish from the wholesaler next door. He spoke when he had to.
Yes, ma’am. No, ma’am. Yes ma’am. No ma’am.
She kept humming at him. “How often do you see your father?”
Shorty looked carefully at his mother. She stuck a tissue through the chain-link fence and dabbed a drop of blood from his lip. Her eyes were dead, a silent warning. Running so long, they could say what they were thinking with a look. “Don’t tell. Don’t trust her. Don’t trust no one.”
He hung his head. “No, lady. He don’t come ’round no more.”
“When did you last see him?”
Again his mother’s warning.
“I don’t remember.”
“Last year,” said his mother.
“Yeah. Christmas. He came by.” This was lies. It was making his father sound like he hadn’t held his hand when they walked down the street. Like he didn’t come home almost every night. Like they didn’t watch B-ball on TV. Like his father wasn’t gonna take him to a Knicks game the day they shot him. Like he couldn’t buy two tickets to Madison Square Garden.
“Go back to your game,” said the social worker. “I have to talk to your mother.”
Like his mother would hear her, while she was twirling her head looking everywhere to make sure they were okay.
Round ball! Coming at him. Hustling downcourt, the Garden a wall of hollering faces. Shorty O’Tool, fast break down the lane. Takes it to the rack.
Shaq yells, “Your daddy was a zoomer.”
“You lying. You don’t even know my daddy.”
“My cuz at Queensbridge tole me.”
Home. The Queensbridge project. Shorty wanted to give up and die. No way to get away. Seemed like everybody knew somebody somewhere. He looked over at the fence. The social worker was talking. His mother’s head was ducked down like a turtle. But she was watching the street.
“Cuz tole me your daddy was a zoomer.”
“My daddy never sold fake rock.”
“How you know that?” said Shaq.
“Mama told me he was a thoroughbred.”
“Thoroughbred?” Shaq laughed in his face.
Shorty’s shoulders sagged even as he forced himself to step close to the taller boy. “I’ll bust you in the grill, Shaq. My mama don’t lie.”
“Why you callin’ me Shaq? My name’s Junior.”
“Knuckle up!”
Junior Brown laughed again. “Knuckle up? Who you kidding, Shorty? You can’t scrap a lick.”
“I can’t care how big you are, Junior. Knuckle up. My mama don’t lie.”
“Oh yeah? Well, tell me this, before I clean your clock. If your daddy was a thoroughbred that sold good dope, how come he got popped?”
Shorty couldn’t speak. It was like the wind got kicked out of him. And suddenly he needed help so bad he could cry. He looked around.
The ref was curled up under a broken bench, hugging an empty bottle of Colt 45. He looked at the other kids, looked for a friend. But he was newjack, and they didn’t know him. They were scoping his tears and gasfacing him, waiting to watch Junior Brown wax his ass. Junior stood a head taller. He had fists all knuckly, sharp-edged like crushed beer cans.
“My mama don’t lie,” Shorty said. Trembling, he raised his fists.
A big kid rolled up. Twelve years old, too old for B-ball with the little guys. He had a smooth round face and a kind smile. He’d had his head shaved for lice, bald as Michael Jordan. “Yo, Junior, give the little guy a break. All of you. Just play ball and chill.”
All the kids stared at him. Nobody moved. Till Michael Jordan lifted Junior Brown off the court by his shirt and said in his face, “Get out there and hoop!”
Junior, Lester, Enrique, and Shawn ran onto the court. Shorty hung back, trying to see where his mother had gone. Michael Jordan nudged him, whispered, “Go on, get out there. I got my eye on you. Me and Magic Johnson are starting a new squad. All-Star All-Stars.
“The best of the rest.
They dream on my team.”
“All right!”
Shorty pulled the game back around him like putting on a coat. Fans were hollering, getting wild. Up in the project walls, the windows were melting into a cheering blur. Roaring, louder than the bus and the fish trucks.
Round ball! Coming at him, fills his hands like his hands and basketballs were made in the same factory, like computers shaped them to fit, like he was born to jump.
Missed. Rim ball. Shorty’s there for the rebound, drives around Shaq, takes Scottie Pippen to the rack. Up and… Dunk!
Can’t hear himself think over the cheering. “Shorty!” they’re hollering. “Shorrr-tee! Shorrr-tee!”
He waves up at the stands and sees twenty thousand fans going wild. All but one. One’s just staring.
“Mama!” He looks for his mother. She’s watching the other way.
One out of twenty thousand is still as ice. Watching, tracking him, tracking Shorty O’Tool like he’s a cat and Shorty’s a rat. A face so still that all the other faces seem to dissolve and blend into one thin sheet of cloth, like curtains blowing from an open window.
Shaquille O’Neal yells, “Look out. Where he going?”
The big Lincoln Navigator is circling the court, rolling right through the stands. People are running and screaming. It bounces over the guardrail onto the court. “Run, Shorty! Run!” Shaq throws an arm over his shoulder, screaming, “Run, run.” But Shorty is frozen to the floor. It’s not possible. This can’t be happening. Right here in the Garden.
“Shorty! Run!”
His mother screams. He sees her on the edge of the court, clawing the chain-link fence, screaming, “Run, run,” so hard that she doesn’t see another scarface creeping up behind her.
The fans throw themselves under the broken benches, yelling, “Gun! Gun! Gun!”
The ref sinks into the body of the drunk again. Shorty’s friends the All-Stars—Shaq and Webber and Houston and Pippen—scatter with Junior, Lester, Enrique, and Shawn. And Madison Square Garden goes dark as a busted TV as the big Navigator turns into a rusty yellow deuce-and-a-quarter Buick filled with the gangstas who killed his father.
“Run, Shorty, run.”
“Mama!”
When at last Shorty runs he runs toward his mother. He hears the Tec-9 going buyaka-buyaka.
But suddenly the fans are going crazy, screaming, lifting him with their cheers. He’s flying, rising over the court, over the garden, searching for that open place.
Something happening behind the chain-link fence. Frantic, desperate motion. Then the boo-yaa, boo-yaa thunder of the twelve-gauge Mossberg pump. Then cops all over, running, shooting.
The boys in blue too late for you.
Too late for us.
But his mother is rising, too. She’s coming with him. The court’s wide open. He sees his shot.
Gimme the rock.
Shaq to Magic to Michael Jordan.
To Shorty.
Jumper.
In!
BUBBA
Stephen Solomita
The way it goes down, I’m more than ready. The moron’s been riding me since the first minute of the first quarter. He does not shut up, not for a minute. You got nothin’, you white bread bitch. You can’t handle my shit. You slow. You old. You ain’t now and you never was.
And me, Bubba Yablonsky, I’m trying to keep the game close because at the end, when we make our move, I want everybody worked up. So I’m letting the moron go by me and I’m missing my shots and this inspires him to even greater rhetorical flights. Where’s yo game, white bread? You leave it with yo mama? Ah think she done stuck it down her panties. ’At’s ’cause it stinks.
I put up with it because I’m basically a goal-oriented guy and because I’ve learned to control my anger.
We’re well into the fourth quarter, the game tied at 38, when their point guard takes a jump shot that comes off the far side of the rim. I box out the moron, who compensates by twisting his knuckles against my spine, then go up for the rebound. The ball drops into my hands, but I don’t catch it. I tip it, instead, toward the sideline.
Spooky Jones, our small forward, is closest to the ball and he fears after it, leaping over the sideline and into the third row of benches. While he’s in the air, I slam my elbow into the moron’s chest, then scrape the heel of my Nikes against his shin. As expected, the moron begins to throw punches, and a moment later both benches empty. Now all eyes are on the combatants, all eyes except those of Road Miller’s wife, Louise. Her eyes are on her work as she yanks at the waist of Spooky’s shorts and jams a small package down into his crotch. The package is bound with double sided tape and molds so nicely to Spooky’s abdomen that when he finally pulls himself up and dashes off to the locker room, nobody notices a thing.
I don’t see the rest of it, of course, because the moron has me by the throat and one of the screws is pounding on my back like I’m the one who won’t let go. But the plan is for Spooky to dump the package beneath a pile of dirty towels in the hamper, then come back on the court. Later, Freddie Morrow will push the hamper to the prison laundry, remove the package, and bring it to yours truly.
It’s an eminently workable prison hustle, brilliantly conceived and elaborately planned. The package contains two ounces of powder cocaine which sells on the inside for two hundred dollars a gram. As there are twenty-eight grams in an ounce and the two ounces are costing me and my partners twelve hundred dollars… well, the math speaks for itself.
I let myself be pulled away from the moron and back to the sidelines where my teammates are already gathered. Spooky Jones isn’t there. That’s because he’s lying in a shower stall, his throat slashed and the product vanished. He’s still bleeding when we find him, his heart still fluttering. His breath whistles through the hole in his throat while a deputy warden screams into the phone for a doctor; his eyes remain open and imploring until the doctor rushes into the locker room. Then Spooky’s breathing stops, for good and forever.
I can’t help it. I’m a criminal. I don’t mourn Spooky. Yeah, he was a good guy and we’d split many a joint during our stay at the Menands Correctional Facility, a minimum security joint with a spectacular view of the Hudson River. But if there’s anything a thief can’t stand, it’s being ripped off. Somebody took my coke and I want it back. As for Spooky Jones, he’s past caring.
Deputy Warden Ezekiel Buchanan rakes me over the coals. Him and Coach Poole, who’s also, technically, a deputy warden.
“You started the fight,” Buchanan tells me. He has a thin face and a long nose and unnaturally red lips. “Can we agree on that?”
I’m thinking, If I was still in Attica, the screws would be working me over with ax handles. I’m thinking, That’s exactly where you’re going, dickhead, back to Attica, where your life is on the line every minute of every day. Say good-bye to paradise.
“Coach,” I finally respond, “I didn’t have anything to do with… with what happened to Spooky. I was on the floor every minute, which you know because you were there. For me, that’s an alibi.”
Coach Poole doesn’t respond. He looks devastated, like a jilted lover. His ebony skin has a grayish cast and his small chocolate eyes are shot through with jagged red veins.
“You wanna answer me, Bubba? Answer the question I asked you?” Buchanan’s a patient guy, a twenty-year man who’s worked a dozen institutions, and he also thinks he’s been betrayed. That’s because he personally recruited the Menands’ basketball team from some of the worst prisons in the system, choosing very carefully from the pool of eligible talent. In the process, he’d put his reputation on the line.
“The only point I wanna make,” I say, “is that the entire team was on the court when this went down. I don’t see how you can blame us.”
“I asked you if you started the fight.”
“It was the moron threw the first punch.”
“After you elbowed him.”
“This is prison basketball, Deputy, which, as you know, is characterized by aggressive defense. You want us to play nice, you tell the officials to start callin’ fouls. They’re your officials, right?” Again, I’m thinking, If you talked like that to a deputy warden in Attica, they’d find pieces of your body in Montreal.
Now I’ve got two goals. I want my coke back and I want to finish my bit at Menands, where life is easy, where the food is edible, where there are no rats, where the screws don’t begin every conversation with Hey, you piece of shit.
“Jones flies into the cheap seats. You start a fight. Jones disappears into the locker room, where he gets killed. Am I supposed to believe this is all coincidental?”
“I didn’t start the fight, Deputy. And I didn’t see when Spooky took off for the locker room. But anybody in the stands could’ve followed him and nobody would’ve noticed.”
We go around and around for another hour. I’m polite and respectful, but I stick to my guns. Fights, I insist, are common under the best of circumstances and this was the New York Prison League’s championship game. High feelings were to be expected and the refs were allowing us to play. Thus, when the very predictable confrontation finally went down, person or persons unknown had taken advantage of the resulting chaos.
Coach begins to perk up toward the end. I’m giving him an out and he knows it. Sure, Menands is a minimum security prison, but it’s still a prison. Assaults among the populace are uncommon, but they happen. Murders are quite rare, but they also happen. I mean, if a murder occurs in the dining hall, do you blame the cook?
When Buchanan finally dismisses me, I plant a seed. “Coach, we’re gonna play a makeup game, right? This is for the championship and we were tied.”
I’m back in living unit 8, locked down, me and the rest of the starting five. Hafez Islam, our starting two-guard, is busting my balls, which I don’t need. Hafez is a prison-converted Black Muslim, the only one at Menands, which has a majority-white population. I’ve never seen him when he wasn’t angry about something, and from time to time (when that anger was directed at me) I was tempted to slap his mouth shut. Unfortunately, our stay at Menands depends as much on our nonviolent behavior of
f the court as on our game-day ferocity. Which meant that I mostly have to eat it.
“I know you up to somethin’, Bubba,” he tells me. “You coulda took that rebound, only you tipped it out. What’s up wit’ that? You fuckin’ wit’ us?”
“What I’m up to is none of your Allah-damned business, Hafez. In fact, you’re disrespecting me by asking the question.” I pause long enough to let the message hit home. “And you better think about something else. If Warden Brook decides that we had anything to do with Spooky gettin’ capped, he’s gonna ship us back where we came from. In your case, if I remember right, that was Green Haven.”
I gather my troops for a team meeting and explain that there had to be five hundred people watching us when Spooky was killed. “You all are just feeling guilty because you’re criminals and you expect to be accused of any crime that takes place in the neighborhood. I want you to put that kinda thinking out to your minds because a week from today we’re most likely gonna be playing a makeup game. And this game, my brothers, we’d best not lose. Understand what I’m tellin’ ya? We cop the trophy, Warden Brook ain’t gonna send us nowhere. But if we lose, we’ll be on the bus before we take a shower.”
Somber nods, sober looks. Now we’re all on the same page.
At eight o’clock, before I have a chance to meet with my surviving partners, Roger “Road” Miller and Hong “Tiny” Lee, I’m called to the office of Warden Odell Brook. Brook was a Notre Dame shooting guard who’d been drafted in the second round by the Detroit Pistons, only to blow out his knee in a schoolyard game before he signed a contract.
“You start that fight, Bubba?”
It was the same question Deputy Buchanan had asked, but this time I put a different spin on it. “I had a bad game, Warden. Real bad. And the moron was in my face from the opening tip.”
“I saw that,” Brook admits. “He was disrespecting you big-time.”
“And I didn’t answer back, right? Even though I was tossing up bricks. Even though he was goin’ right by me.”
“Yeah, fine. You were an angel.” He waves a long blunt finger in my direction. “But that rebound, Bubba. You coulda taken it down. You know that.”
Murder at the Foul Line Page 29