Airball

by L. D. Harkrader

  “Everyone.”

  “Okay. But who was really taller than her?”

  Bragger rolled his eyes. “Brett McGrew. Brett McGrew was really taller than your mother. Brett McGrew must’ve worn this costume with her. In fact, Brett McGrew probably asked her to the Sweetheart Dance right here in this flea-bitten mound of fur. Is that what you want to hear?”

  Yes, actually, it was.

  And now here we were, hunkered down inside that same flea-bitten mound of fur, breathing three generations of dust and mildew as we waddled toward the high school trophy case.

  And possibly toward our doom.

  Music blasted from the cafeteria. Cowboys, fortunetellers, and somebody dressed like a giant zit flocked toward it. But the trophy case was on the other side of the building, down the hallway, around the corner by the home ec room, past the office, and into the front lobby.

  We circled a gang of belly dancers clustered outside the girls’ bathroom and headed toward the darkness. Casually. Not running. Not panicking. Not attracting the attention of suspicious vice principals. Just your ordinary, everyday prairie dog, shuffling away from a party.

  We rounded the corner by the home ec room. Except for a far-off glow coming from around the corner at the other end, the hall was pitch-black. An ax murderer could’ve been waving a big shiny ax in my face, and I wouldn’t have seen him. I gripped the camera and set off through the darkness. Bragger shuffled along behind. We reached the far end. I veered to the side and hugged the wall.

  I slid one side of my big prairie dog head around the corner and peered through the eyehole. The glow I’d seen was coming from the lobby, from the display lights in the trophy case.

  And in front of the trophy case—

  —stood Coach.

  “Ulgp!” I strangled a yelp and pulled my prairie dog head back. Fast.

  And almost dropped the camera. I grabbed for it. My finger hit the button, taking a picture of who knew what. I gave a silent prayer of gratitude that it was a no-flash camera. And waited for a horrified minute to see if Coach had heard the click.

  “What?” Bragger whispered. “The vice principal?”

  “Worse,” I hissed. “Coach.”

  “Coach? What’s he doing here?”

  “I don’t know, Bragger. I didn’t have my head poked out there long enough to find out.”

  “Well, stick it out again and see.”

  I took a deep breath and inched my prairie dog head past the corner. I felt like some kind of spy: Kirby Nickel, alias James Bond. Cleverly disguised as a giant rodent. I aimed my eyehole at Coach.

  He stood perfectly still, his back to me, staring into the trophy case. His arms were splayed out on the case above him, his forehead pressed against it. His breath huffed out in a foggy circle on the glass.

  At first I thought he was staring at the Brett McGrew stuff. The trophies and medals. The retired number 5 jersey. The poster-size cutout photo of McNet tipping in the winning basket at the state championship his senior year.

  That’s what most people stare at. You can’t help yourself, everything’s so big and shiny.

  But Coach was off to one side, where the team photos were a little smaller. And a lot dustier. The medals were tarnished, the ribbons faded, and the trophies weren’t polished to a blinding sheen. One of the display lights was burnt out, and that whole section of the trophy case fell under the shadow of the giant Brett McGrew cutout.

  Coach snorted and pushed back from the glass, and I could finally see what he’d been staring at: an old team picture. Fluffy-haired players in skin-tight shorts.

  Coach stood there rubbing his bristly chin. Finally he tapped his finger on the glass, almost like he was saying good-bye, and started to walk away. He stopped at the Brett McGrew cutout. Stared at it for a long moment.

  He shook his head, gave another little snort, and clanked through the double doors on the other side of the lobby.

  “He’s gone,” I said.

  We trundled around the corner, to the big, shiny Brett McGrew display. I wedged the camera into my eyehole and snapped pictures of the trophies, the medals, the jersey, the team photos, the newspaper clippings. I took three pictures of the giant cutout from various directions, just in case looking at it from a different angle made it look more like me.

  I backed Bragger up so I could snap a picture of the entire display. The camera clicked and made a little whirring noise.

  “Out of film,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  We started to turn around and trundle back the way we had come. But then we heard voices. And keys jingling. A door creaked open, and lights flashed on around the corner. Voices again; then somebody laughed.

  “The vice principal,” Bragger hissed.

  “In the office,” I whispered back.

  For a second, we just stood there. We couldn’t go back. And we sure couldn’t stay where we were. The only way out was the door Coach had disappeared through. I dragged Bragger across the lobby and eased the door open. I squeezed through, Bragger fishtailed around behind me, and I eased the door shut.

  And there was Coach. Again. This time dribbling a basketball in the nearly dark gymnasium. I pressed Bragger and me and the prairie dog into the little space at the end of the bleachers. And peered out through my eyeholes. A shaft of moonlight shone through the windows above the bleachers, spotlighting the basket at the far end of the court. Coach dribbled in place, then drove toward the basket. When he reached it, he took one last step, pushed off, and leaped. Up and around and around again.

  Th-bumpf.

  The ball hit the backboard and swished through the net.

  Brett McGrew’s famous spinning layup.

  Executed perfectly.

  Twelve

  “A spinning layup?” Bragger splatted through a puddle. “Kinda like Brett McGrew?”

  “No,” I said. “Exactly like Brett McGrew. He never missed. Not once.”

  We’d stayed there in the gym, squashed against the bleachers, until Coach finally got tired and left. Then we scrambled across the court, still stuffed into the costume, and out the side door at the other end.

  Now we were headed home, Bragger’s dad’s no-flash auto-crisp camera stuffed up under the prairie dog for protection. It was drizzling, like it did every Halloween, with the wind spitting rain at us, and I couldn’t risk getting the camera wet. My whole future rested on that one roll of film.

  I veered off the sidewalk. Bragger slogged along behind, splashing mud up the back of my legs. We cut through the side yard and crunched down my driveway.

  “You know,” said Bragger, “Coach must be taking this whole retiring-the-jersey thing more seriously than he’s letting on. I mean, he acts like meeting Brett McGrew is no big deal, but then there he is, practicing McNet’s moves in the gym.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Iron Man Mike Armstrong: secret Brett McGrew fan. Who knew?”

  We clomped up the back steps, through the porch, and into the house. The kitchen was empty. I could hear Grandma in the front room, handing out bite-size Snickers and pretending to be scared of a three-foot-tall vampire.

  Bragger wriggled out of the back end of the costume. I lifted the prairie dog head off my own head. Or at least, I tried to lift it. I got the shoulder part about as high as my throat before it caught on something and snapped back. About strangled me.

  I reached up under the prairie dog head and found the problem: a piece of wire that had gotten hooked on the little zipper-pull thingy on the front of my sweatshirt. I poked it out and pulled off the mangy prairie dog head.

  A small metal disk clanked to the floor.

  “Hey.” I picked it up and held it up to the light. “Look at this.”

  Bragger squinted. “Looks like a medal. Like from a letter jacket or something.”

  “Yeah.” I scrubbed it across my jeans to get the dust off. “Whoa.”

  “What?” Bragger leaned closer to get a better look.

  “There’s a basketball on the
front. And look what it says: Great Plains League Champions, Boys’ Varsity Basketball.”

  Bragger took the medal. He studied the front, then flipped it over. “The year’s engraved on the back. Wow, this sucker’s old. What is that, like eighteen years ago?”

  “Eighteen years ago?” I plucked the medal from Bragger’s fingers.

  And stared at the date. Stared at the basketball medal glimmering in the palm of my hand. For a moment, I couldn’t move. If this had been a movie instead of my pitiful ordinary life, light would’ve shone down, orchestra music would’ve swelled, and Bragger and I would’ve stared at each other in slow motion, stunned by the hugeness of the moment.

  “Eighteen years ago,” I said, my voice barely a whisper. “Brett McGrew would’ve been a freshman in high school.” I looked up. “Do you realize what this means?”

  “No,” said Bragger, obviously not stunned by the hugeness of the moment. “But I’m sure you’ll tell me.”

  “It means Brett McGrew was inside this prairie dog head.”

  He looked at me sideways. “It does?”

  “Yeah. Brett McGrew wore this costume with my mother. Think about it. My mom’s the back of the prairie dog, and Brett McGrew’s the front, because he’s taller. And he’s wearing his letter jacket, and this little wire thing gets caught on his medal, just like it got caught on my sweatshirt, only he doesn’t realize it, just like I didn’t at first, and when he pulls it off, he rips the medal off, too. And it gets stuck. Only he doesn’t notice. And Brett McGrew’s freshman-year league championship medal stays right here in my mother’s prairie dog head for eighteen years.”

  “Lucky thing you came along to find it,” said Bragger.

  “You’re right. I didn’t even think about that. Eighteen years later, I come along, looking for evidence that will prove who Brett McGrew really is, who I really am, and I find his medal. Only you know what? It’s not luck. It’s more like, like fate. Like it was supposed to happen.”

  “When you grow up, Kirby, you ought to think about writing soap operas. Seriously. You’d be good at it. Stuff like this happens a lot on Grandma’s stories.”

  I looked at him. “This is not Grandma’s stories, Bragger. This is a basketball medal from Brett McGrew’s freshman year that got stuck inside a prairie dog my mother used to wear. That’s a fact. I didn’t make it up.”

  “Okay. Don’t get mad.” He held his hands up. “All I’m saying is, there were probably twelve guys on that basketball team. Twelve guys who got medals. And eleven of them weren’t Brett McGrew. That’s all I’m saying. I’m just trying to be, you know, the voice of reason.”

  Oh, yeah. Bragger Barnes, voice of reason.

  We hauled the prairie dog up the back stairway and set it in the tub in the upstairs bathroom so it could dry out. I stashed the medal in my underwear drawer, inside one of my lucky Jayhawk sweat socks.

  Because I knew what I had to do with it. I would take it with me to Lawrence, where I’d personally present it to Brett McGrew. After all these years, he’d probably given up hope of ever finding it again. He probably didn’t even let himself think about it anymore because the memory was too painful.

  And I, Kirby Nickel, would be the one to take that pain away. I would reunite Brett McGrew with his very first championship medal. He’d be so grateful he’d probably want to adopt me on the spot.

  Which would make it a whole lot easier for me to tell him I was already his son.

  Thirteen

  The wild October wind swirled into a chill November blast. It whistled through town, plastering bits of litter flat against the playground fence and whipping the flags above the post office into a wind-beaten frenzy.

  Something was whipping the town’s good citizens into a frenzy, too, but it wasn’t the wind.

  I got my first whiff of it Monday after practice. Grandma was at the kitchen table sorting through mail when I got home. I banged through the back door and dropped my backpack onto a chair. Grandma didn’t look up. Just handed me a folded-up newspaper article.

  “Sports column,” she said. “My cousin Mildred up in Tonganoxie sent it. Clipped it out of Sunday’s Kansas City Star.”

  I unfolded it. JAYHAWK FLIES HOME, read the headline. Then in smaller print underneath, Kansas’s Favorite Son Returns to College to See Jersey Retired.

  It was more than your ordinary sports column. It was half of the front page of the sports section, plus two pages on the inside. It documented Brett McGrew’s entire career, from Stuckey High School to MVP of last year’s NBA championship game. In color. With pictures.

  I looked up at Grandma. “This was really nice of your cousin.”

  “Huh.” Grandma was studying the water bill. “Not as nice as you might think. Mildred’s always felt a little superior, living as close as she does to Kansas City.”

  I scootched into a kitchen chair and smoothed the clipping out in front of me.

  The column started with the usual stuff: college feats, NBA feats, awards, stats, records. Nothing I hadn’t read a thousand times before. But I didn’t mind. I’d read it again. Another thousand times probably.

  But then I got to a section about Brett McGrew’s humble beginnings:

  Brett McGrew’s basketball career started in the most unlikely of places: Stuckey, Kansas, population 334. It started the day Brett McGrew’s father nailed a backboard to the side of his barn and held three-year-old Brett up to drop a basketball through the hoop.

  I stopped reading, almost afraid to see what came next. This section of this article might be the very thing I needed. Exactly what I’d been searching for. The last crucial piece of evidence. Something from his years in Stuckey that would prove he was my father.

  Not that I actually thought it would say, “And now that he’s attained such success on the court, McNet’s fondest wish is to connect with the son he left behind in his hometown.” But I did think it might mention something I could use. Maybe about the people who helped Brett McGrew get from Stuckey to national acclaim. Like, say, his high school basketball coach. Or his high school teammates. Or maybe his girlfriend. Maybe the article said something about my mother.

  I glanced up at Grandma. She was flipping through the JCPenney sale flyer, not paying any attention to me. I pulled the paper closer and started reading again:

  Since Brett McGrew’s days as a high school player, Stuckey has hitched its reputation to its most famous—or should I say, only famous—son. No matter where you go in this one-stoplight town, from the water tower to the lone gas station, you’re bombarded by signs, scoreboards, T-shirts, coffee mugs, matchbook covers, and bumper stickers, all proclaiming Stuckey as the “Basketball Capital of Kansas.” Which begs the question: Could this tiny windblown corner of the prairie really be the basketball capital of the entire state?

  A glance through the Kansas high school record books provides an answer. While it’s true that the Stuckey Prairie Dogs have played for the Kansas state high school championship four times—all four years Brett McGrew was in school, with McNet leading his team to victories in three of those games—Stuckey hasn’t been to the playoffs before or since. Want to know how pathetic their record is? The town is sending its seventh-grade team to watch Brett McGrew’s jersey retirement, and the Stuckey seventh graders haven’t won a game in three years.

  It’s also true that, to this day, players from Stuckey hold the Kansas high school records for most career points, rebounds, steals, blocked shots, and free throws. But guess who holds them? Yep. Except for most steals, held by some obscure Stuckey guard nobody’s ever heard of, Brett McGrew holds every single one of those records.

  The verdict? The town’s reputation rests on one guy, one amazing, legendary player: Brett “McNet” McGrew. Without him, Stuckey would have no claim to the title “Basketball Capital of Kansas.” It would more likely be “The Forgotten Armpit of Kansas.” But of course, that wouldn’t sell as many bumper stickers.

  Armpit? I blinked. Wow.

 
I must’ve rustled the paper or something, because Grandma peered over her bifocals at me. “Guess you got to the part Mildred likes,” she said.

  * * *

  Unfortunately, Grandma and I weren’t the only ones in Stuckey to get their hands on a copy of that sports column.

  Within twenty-four hours, the Forgotten Armpit of Kansas had replaced Lloyd Metcalf’s fancy new combine as the main topic of conversation at the Double Dribble. Mrs. Snodgrass had more coffee business that week than she’d had all fall, although she was losing some of her customers to the periodical section of the public library, which had suddenly become one of the most popular spots in town. Folks clogged the aisle, waiting their turn to read the library’s lone copy of the Sunday Kansas City Star.

  Well. Mrs. Zimmer wasn’t about to stand by and let a big-city paper like the Star sully the town’s good name. No, sir. She fired off a letter to the editor, demanding a full apology. Then she marched down to the library and demanded that the librarian remove the offending sports section from the Sunday issue.

  The librarian refused, of course. Even here in Stuckey we’ve heard of freedom of the press. But Mrs. Zimmer wasn’t one to let a little thing like civil liberties stand in her way. She marched over to the periodical section herself and snapped the tattered sports section from the ninety-seven-year-old hands of Mr. Homer Hawkins. She tucked it in her purse and marched out of the library. “This article is good for only one thing,” she said as she rattled out the door. “Lighting a fire in my fireplace.”

  “And she did it, too,” said Duncan. “Burned it up as soon as she got home.”

  Duncan was always a reliable source of information, what with his mother running the only beauty parlor in town.

  “Didn’t do her much good, though,” Duncan added. “Somebody Xeroxed that column first thing Monday morning. Copies have been floating around town all week. My mom’s got a whole stack of them by her cash register.”

  Within twenty-four hours, everybody from here to Dodge City had heard that the seventh-grade team from the Armpit of Kansas was headed to Lawrence to honor Brett McGrew.