Hero

by Perry Moore

  I didn't think she was a slow learner. VI think she just didn't have that much to say yet.

  When I came in one afternoon for my weekly reading ses¬sion to the kids, Phyllis informed me that this was an important day for the Student Life Center: Cindy from the State and vari¬ous other community leaders had come to tour the facility for "a very special visit."

  "What for?" I said. "A book burning?" I was only allowed to read from a strict list of state-approved "culturally sensitive" books.

  "No, even better," Phyllis said. "Budget cuts."

  Phyllis warned me that they might stop by while I read to the kids. Everyone was to be on best behavior, since these visits had a direct impact on their annual operating budget. In my mind, this meant I should take advantage of the opportunity single-handedly to win them their funding for those streetlights in the parking lot they desperately needed to stay open late. So instead of the usual lighthearted reading (Hop on Pop and Green Eggs and Ham were favorites), I decided to impart a little environmental wisdom, and I grabbed a worn paperback copy of The Lorax from the bookshelf above Phyllis's desk. That should impress the visitors.

  The tour group had already made themselves at home when I walked in. They stood in the back with attentive, stiff smiles on their faces, and seemed to study my every move as I sat down to read. Cindy from the State popped a lozenge in her mouth. I could hear her sucking on it as I opened the book.

  '"I am the Lorax and I speak for the trees!'"

  I think I was trying a little too hard. The kids didn't make

  a noise, and I realized this wasn't exactly one of the Doctor's more cheerful books.

  Here I had introduced these kids to the rich, colorful world of Dr. Seuss, and in the span of one afternoon, I tore it all down and drove away all the cute, furry creatures. There wasn't a single laugh or giggle in the whole room. You could hear the squeaking sound of sneakers as they pivoted on the basketball court in the gym down the hall. I heard Cindy crunch on her lozenge through her closed mouth. When I finished the last page, which warned the children to take care of their world, I closed the book and asked the group of blank faces, "Well, what did you think?"

  Silence filled the room. The group of adults standing in the back craned their necks to examine the kids' reactions.

  I imagined the number of kids who returned next week would drop off dramatically, funding would be cut, they'd never get their streetlights. The whole center would eventually be shut down.

  I caught Sunita out of the corner of my eye as she rubbed her eyes. Great, I even made one of them cry.

  "Sunita, are you okay?" I asked.

  She looked up at me with an intense stare, and then the lit¬tle girl who never spoke opened her mouth.

  "THOSE FUCKERS BETTER PUT THOSE TREES BACK WHERE THEY BELONG OR I AM GOING TO FUCKING KILL THEM!"

  "Why don't we go see what's happening in the pottery class." Phyllis hurried the visitors out of the room. As the tour left, I saw Cindy's mouth was still open.

  The next week they asked me if perhaps I'd be happier working with some of the older students. As Phyllis rushed off to round up some troubled students for me to tutor, I checked her shelf for some books to have them read out loud. Nothing jumped out at me. Picture books were too juvenile, and Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Fitzgerald weren't exactly going to score any points for relevance with this crowd. I knelt down and opened the lowest drawer of her desk and dug deep for some workbooks.

  "What are you doing in there?"

  I jumped and hit my head on the desk. I turned around and saw one of my new students, about my age, standing behind me.

  "You scared me." I shut the file cabinet.

  "What are you doing in there?"

  He had a thick accent, so his family must have only moved here recently. One of the many English-as-a-second-language students who came to the center to learn English. He sounded just like Ismeta, the cleaning lady at school who'd once talked to our class about her experiences as a Bosnian refugee. I always felt bad for the ESL students. I couldn't imagine what I'd do if I had to take chemistry in Bratislava, or learn high-school French in Pakistan. Maybe I could start with the Dr. Seuss after all, I considered. I picked up Hop on Pop, and he eyed me suspiciously.

  "Oh, I was just looking for something for us to read tonight," I said, slowly enunciating each word. "Do you like books?"

  He stared at me. He didn't blink.

  "See, that's the great thing about learning English. You get

  to read some cool books and stuff, 'so it's not all about boring homework."

  He still didn't blink. "Books and stuff?" He repeated the words like he was spitting out poison.

  "Yeah," I said. "It's pretty fun when you get into it. Reading and all."

  Phyllis hurried back in the room. She hadn't yet noticed the toilet paper on the back of her shoe.

  "I see you've met Goran," she said.

  "Yes." I smiled. "I have the feeling he's going to pick up English in no time."

  Phyllis looked at Goran to see if I was serious and then looked back at me.

  "Thorn, Goran founded the literacy program for the older kids here two years ago. I asked him to show you the ropes tonight," she said. She leaned in to me and continued, "You should take a look at Goran's poetry if you get a chance. Harper's published one of his poems last month."

  Goran, arms folded, stared at me with contempt.

  Sometimes I am the world's biggest loser.

  "Goran, this is Thorn, one of our new volunteers." Then she added with a lower, hushed tone, "Keep him away from the Dr. Seuss."

  I couldn't bring myself to make eye contact with him when I stood up to shake his hand. He was a full two inches taller than I was.

  He shook my hand hard and slow. Hard enough to send a message about his strength, and slow enough to tell me that the handshake—like any other future interaction of ours—would

  begin and end on his terms. I managed to make brief eye contact and then he let go.

  Goran's utter lack of expression made me think he was going to hit me.

  He opened his mouth to say something, but stopped short of any words. Instead, he turned and walked down the hall, long determined strides, and I struggled to keep up with him.

  After he introduced me to my new students that night, I never saw him again. Phyllis said he'd switched nights because he'd recently taken a full-time job, in addition to his regular schooling and extracurricular activities.

  "He supports his family, you know," Phyllis whispered, like it was a secret.

  I could barely imagine supporting myself, much less an entire family. I'd bitched ad nauseam when I had to pick up work as a stock boy last Christmas. Lifeguarding each summer at the pool hadn't exactly been a real career motivator or moneymaker, either.

  "What does he do?" I asked.

  "Security," she said. "He's a night watchman."

  I always wanted to run into him again and tell him I was sorry. That I was an idiot and I wasn't thinking when I met him, and I'm not usually like that. Maybe we'd even have a laugh about it—stranger things have happened. But I never saw him again.

  Until he popped me in the eye during the basketball game and stole the ball from me.

  "Foul!" my dad shouted from the stands. "Are you blind?! Foul!"

  I sped down the court, my eye stinging from the sweat that trickled in the welt left by Goran. He pulled up at the top of the key and sunk a three-pointer, which put his team ahead. By the time I got back under the basket, the elbows were flying on both sides. It wasn't out of loyalty to me, either. I'd grown used to the fact that my father's disgrace had isolated me from most of my childhood friends. By high school I'd learned it was easier not to make friends in the first place than to lose them after they found out about my dad. But even if my team didn't care much about me personally, they didn't like someone else getting away with a cheap shot against them. And they cer¬tainly didn't like the idea of losing.

  I'm guessing
that's why Clayton Camp, our Harvard-bound power forward—who graced us with his presence on the basket¬ball court only because it kept him in shape for another All-American lacrosse season—lashed out. I'd just missed a layup, a real confidence builder during such a tight game, and the rebound had bounced in Clayton's direction. Clayton had already slightly bent his knees and lined up his three-point shot, but the ball never reached his fingertips. Goran intercepted the ball with impossible speed. Frustrated and humiliated, Clayton turned around and kicked the back of Goran's heel as hard as he could.

  No one at the game that night would ever see a more fla¬grant foul in his lifetime. Not even the ones who would go on to play ball in prison. As Goran tripped, the momentum from his sprint propelled his massive frame through the air parallel to the floor. He landed on his leg and knee with an eerie crunch and tumbled into the bleachers.

  The Tuckahoe Trojans cleared the bench.

  Clayton got the worst of it. The Trojans' point guard, a lit¬tle guy who looked like Gary Coleman on steroids, led the charge. I saw Clayton disappear under a pile of Trojans as they pummeled him. It took almost every adult in the gym to pull the kids off each other and restore order.

  Meanwhile, I looked over at Goran, who was doing his best to hide an expression—excruciating agony. He was crouched in a fetal position clutching his knee. He heaved deep, labored breaths through clenched teeth, but he was determined not to cry. If an accident this painful didn't make him cry like a baby, I figured the guy didn't have tear ducts or nerves or something, because when I looked down at the injury, I saw bone.

  A portion of his tibia had poked its head out of the skin under his knee. The crowd had cleared away to give him plenty of breathing room. A few kids were yelling and pointing. Most of the parents couldn't even look. One of the mothers—his?— was screaming to call an ambulance. The trainer was one of the only people who hadn't turned away, but he was next to useless. Other than giving Goran a few towels to wipe up the gore, he was practically as helpless as the rest of them. He could tape a sprain, sure, but a mangled leg was a little out of his depth.

  I can't explain why I did what I did next. I guess I was thinking about Goran and his full-time job and how he would support his family if he lost his leg. I guess I was thinking how his eyes, still deeply guarded, still opaque, didn't betray the weakness of the rest of his body. I was propelled by a force deep within me that I didn't understand. I knelt down beside him.

  "Let me see," I said.

  He couldn't speak, he was so racked with pain. I reached out my hand. He looked at me, startled and curious. I hesitated for a moment. Then I grabbed his leg firmly by the ankle.

  "Don't touch it!" The trainer winced.

  Goran eyes locked on mine. I held on to his ankle and my hands began to move up his leg. I reached the wound and cov¬ered it with my palms, bone and bloody bits and all.

  His eyes never lowered their gaze.

  My hands suddenly felt scalding hot, and all I wanted to do was pull them away and stick them in a pile of snow, but I held on for as long as I could. I felt dizzy, and my eyelids grew heavy. Something was guiding my hands, something I couldn't see or understand, like a Ouija board that actually works.

  Finally the whistle blew, and the ref asked us all to return to our respective benches. An ambulance had arrived, and I saw two technicians wheeling out a stretcher for Goran. His breath¬ing had finally relaxed, his face suddenly expressionless again.

  He never broke eye contact with me, even when I turned around to head back to the bench with the rest of my team. Bewildered at my own actions, I stopped to catch my breath and spotted my father carefully observing me from the bleach¬ers. He had a peculiar look on his face and held up his hands and pointed them at me. I looked at my hands and saw that I had blood on my palms. Not as much as you'd expect, but blood nevertheless. I saw the new parents notice my Dad standing with both hands out of his pockets. I wiped the blood off on my jersey and crouched down to huddle with the rest of my team.

  Clayton earned his first ejection from a game, and after the Trojans sank two free throws from the technical foul, we resumed play. We were losing only by a narrow five-point margin, but I didn't really give a shit about winning anymore.

  That is, until that little punk-ass Gary Coleman look-alike clipped me as he drove for the basket. I didn't bother to foul him—if he wanted to score that bad, he could knock himself out, as far as I was concerned. But it was what he said after he clipped me that made all the difference.

  After the ball went through the hoop, he looked at me with a prune face and said, "Faggot."

  That made me want to win more than I've ever wanted to win any game in my life. I glared at the scoreboard and wiped the crusted saliva from the corners of my mouth. Only two min¬utes left. I sped past him to the basket. I got the ball at the top of the paint and fake-pumped a pass in his face before driving to the basket for another two.

  We stayed down under the basket for a full-court press, man-to-man. Sticking on a single opposing player, shadowing his every move, is the most exhausting form of defense there is. You can't keep it up for more than a few minutes without drop¬ping, but adrenaline fueled me. I wasn't going to let their center get the ball under any circumstance. My arms stretched into the air, blocking any clear path from the ball to his hands. My feet bounced and danced around him. Wherever he went, I was there. The Gary Coleman point guard had trouble getting past midcourt with our press, so with no other option, he lobbed it to their center. I leaped up in the air and snatched it.

  I could have passed it off to anyone else on my team; they were all closer to the basket than I was. But I broke into a sprint and took it myself at full speed the entire length of the court, right past Gary Coleman to the basket for an easy layup. I smacked my palm against the glass backboard for emphasis, and the sound echoed throughout the gym. I looked in the stands and saw my father jumping and shouting for me, and the cacophony of the crowd drowned out his voice. I saw that my hand had left a plum-colored smear on the backboard, a combi¬nation of my sweat and Goran's blood.

  Then my finger began to twitch. This may seem like a pretty harmless detail, nothing more than a little side effect of all that adrenaline and testosterone, or maybe I'd smacked the glass too hard, but for me it's one of the worst things that can happen. The twitching only starts with the finger. It rarely stops there.

  Suddenly I started to feel like I was hearing things under water, like I was walking through Jell-O. My tongue secreted a metallic, acrid taste, as if I were sucking on a rusty nail, or drinking water from a tin bucket. I swallowed and tried to ignore it, but the warning signs were always the same.

  The spotlights hanging from the rafters cast a halo around everything. Then the world around me grew dim. It reminded me of looking through an old View-Master, and the dark outlines around the edge of the picture slowly grew and grew until the entire picture became dark, too.

  I put my hands on my knees and heaved and huffed as I tried to catch my breath.

  "Cosmic Boy . . . Lightning Lad. . . Chemical King ..."

  On rare occasions, I'd been able to stave off the seizure if I caught it early. I practiced some good old-fashioned rhythmic breathing I'd learned in swim class, and I recited to myself the roster of The Legion of Super heroes, my favorite comic book when I was a kid. Back before Dad banned all superhero comics from our house, back before the books detailing my father's adventures had been canceled, all old issues removed from the shelves and discarded. This was how I struggled to regain my composure, to ward off the full throes of the seizure.

  ". . . Invisible Kid. . . Colossal Boy . . . Phantom Girl. . , Element Lad..."

  The world began to tilt, and I felt like I was about to spin off into orbit. Like you felt as a kid when you were rolling down a hill, only this hill had no end. I struggled to hold all my atoms together as the world around me grew dark. My feet became numb, and the twitching had traveled up my arm to the side of my face.
>
  Even as far away as he was, my father saw the right side of my mouth quiver. He pushed past the young couple new to town, his ruined hand planted on the wife's shoulder for balance, and jumped over the side of the bleacher to rush to me.

  I closed my eyes and took three more quick, sharp breaths.

  "Saturn Girl. . . Shadow Lass . . . Ultra Boy ..."

  I looked up, and my vision returned in time to see the basketball sailing for my head. I reached out and grabbed it with my twitching hand. I struggled to hold on to the ball. My fingers sputtered and spasmed like they'd been plugged into a light socket.

  The world stopped. I could hear bits of conversations echo off the cinder block walls. The paramedics argued over where to put the dressing on Goran's leg. They could no longer find the spot where the bone had punctured the skin.

  My dad raced toward me. I saw there were three seconds left on the clock, I heard my team, the coach, the stands yell, "Shoot it!"

  ". . . Chameleon Boy, Dream Girl, WILDFIRE!"

  I bit my lip to stop it from shaking, and with all the energy I could muster I jumped into the air and pushed the ball forward. The basketball quelled the twitching as it rolled off my fingertips. The ball sailed through the air at an impossibly low angle. It hit the backboard—loud and hard—and bricked straight back through the hoop with a graceful swish.

  The crowd erupted with cheers. The buzzer sounded the end of the game, and I stood there looking at the scoreboard in disbelief. I saw my dad standing in front of me on the court.

  "You okay?" he mouthed over the din of the crowd, a skep¬tical look on his face.

  I nodded, and then my teammates pounced on me. My dad took a step back behind the bleachers, and my team picked me up in the air. As I rode on top of sweaty, eager hands, I watched the paramedics wheel Goran out the door, around the side of the gym. It was hard to tell, jostled around up in the air like that, but I could have sworn I saw that same expressionless stare fixed on me as he disappeared around the corner.

  Later, fresh and showered, we met our parents in front of the gym. I pushed open the door and savored the moist promise of spring in the evening air. The sun was setting later and later each day, summer would be here soon, and everything would be okay. I rubbed my hand through my wet hair and spotted Dad waiting under the streetlight in the far corner of their parking lot. The New Parents sidestepped my father to get to their parking space. I saw the mother lean over and whisper a private word with her husband as she pointed at my dad, a sharp look on her face. Dad put his bad hand in his pocket and jingled his keys. This was the gesture he made whenever he pretended not to notice.