Night Hoops

by Carl Deuker

  I decided to call Dad. I wasn't sure what I was going to say, whether I'd tell him about Trent or not. I just wanted to talk to him.

  We have a phone upstairs in the hallway between Scott's room and mine. I punched in Dad's number. The phone rang once, twice. But instead of his voice, I heard a woman's. "Hello." Her voice was bright and sunny.

  The blood drained out of me. I stood still, holding the receiver tight. "Hellooooo," she repeated, laughing. "Anybody there?"

  I hung up without a word.

  Chapter 7

  The next day my legs felt heavy and my mind dull. But oddly enough, I played better; maybe I was just too tired to be jittery, too brain-dead to care. Whatever the reason, I saw the whole court. And that's what playing point guard comes to—seeing the court. When I'm on, it's as if I'm going at full speed while everyone else is moving in slow motion.

  Luke was playing better too. I was getting him the ball where he could do damage, and his outside jumper was dropping. Swish!...Swish!...Swish! When the defenders tightened up on him, he cut back door and I hit him with bounce passes for driving lay-ins.

  It wasn't as if I purposefully froze Trent out. Luke had the hot hand so I kept feeding him the ball, which is what you're supposed to do. But I'll admit that I could see Trent was getting frustrated; I could see it in his face, see it in the elbows he started tossing around. And I'll also admit I didn't do anything about it.

  The explosion came just before the final scrimmage ended. We were playing the Gold team, and we were crushing them. Trent grabbed a defensive rebound and burst out of the pack, dribbling hard down the right side of the court. I took the center lane and Luke was to my left. Trent should have given me the ball, but he probably figured he wouldn't have gotten it back, and he was probably right.

  When he reached the key, he did a spin move on the first guy and blew right by him. But Matt Markey was clogging the middle, holding his position. Trent bowled him over—totally flattening him—just as he threw up his shot, an incredible spinning lay-in that tickled the twine as the two of them crashed to the ground. It was the shot of the day, but O'Leary blew the whistle. "That's a charge!" he called out. "No basket."

  Trent climbed to his feet. "You suck, old man," he muttered, just loud enough for O'Leary to hear him.

  "What did you say?" O'Leary demanded.

  Trent glared at him. "I said, 'You suck.' And I'll say it again: 'You suck.'"

  Coach O'Leary's face and ears went bright red. "Off the court, Dawson. Off the court right this instant. And don't come back unless you bring a letter of apology and a better attitude. I don't need you, kid; you need me."

  Trent pointed his finger at O'Leary. "Let me tell you something, Fatso. I don't need you." Then he looked around at all of us. "I don't need any of you. This whole thing sucks!" He grabbed the basketball from Markey and slammed it down. It bounced at least thirty feet in the air. With that he stormed off the court. A couple of guys laughed nervously. But O'Leary glared at them, and they went quiet.

  Practice ended about ten minutes later. In the locker room evidence of Trent's fury was everywhere. The trash cans had all been tipped over and kicked around. Any clothes or shoes that had been left out had been thrown every which way.

  "There's one less guy to worry about," Tom McShane said as he righted one of the garbage cans. "And I'll tell you, I'm glad he's gone. I didn't like playing against him. The guy never let you breathe."

  "That's the truth," Carlos Fabroa chimed in.

  On the walk home I expected Luke to be falling all over himself thanking me. After all, he'd scored about fifty points, and forty-eight had come on assists from me. His chances for making the team had soared, yet he was strangely quiet. "What's eating you?" I asked at last.

  "I've been thinking about what Tom and Carlos said."

  "That they're glad Trent quit? I guess just about everybody feels that way."

  "No, not that."

  "What then?"

  "About how they said they hated to have Trent guard them."

  "Yeah, so?"

  "Well, so would every player on every other team, wouldn't they? Dawson plays tough defense, really in your face, nonstop."

  "What are you saying?"

  "I'm saying I hope Trent does come back tomorrow. We'd be a better team with him than without him."

  "You've got to be kidding. The guy thinks only of himself. He has zero commitment to his teammates."

  "Come on, Nick. As if you do."

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "It means that we're all the same out there, looking out for ourselves, trying to shine for Coach. Me, you, Trent, everybody."

  "All right," I admitted, "that's true enough. At least now, during tryouts. But after tryouts, I'll change and you'll change, but Trent wouldn't."

  "You don't know that."

  "I do know it."

  We walked for a while in silence. I could tell he was angry. "Look," I said, "I don't know what we're arguing about. You heard O'Leary. He's off the team unless he apologizes, and there's no way in the world he will. So let's just forget about him. Okay?"

  "Yeah, sure," Luke answered, but we never did get talking about anything else.

  That night at dinner I kept going over the scrimmage in my mind, seeing times when I could have fed Trent a nice pass but hadn't. Just a couple of hoops, and he might not have blown up.

  "Something wrong, Nick?" Mom asked.

  I shook my head. "Nothing."

  Up in my room, I thought about the woman who was living with Dad. I didn't want to meet her or even see her. I couldn't imagine having to live the way Trent did—with different guys in the house all the time. Having different men eat at the table, shower in the bathroom, sit on the sofa in the front room, and then go to bed with my mom—I couldn't take that.

  I got so sick of thinking about Trent that I was actually glad when I remembered I had homework to do in geometry. I opened my book and started in.

  The problems at the top of the page were easy, but the word problems at the bottom were killers. They were all about picture frames and gardens with borders and rectangular swimming pools with square decks and circular spas.

  I'd been working about thirty minutes when the gate leading to my back yard creaked open. That was followed by the steady thump thump thump of a basketball being dribbled on concrete. Beneath me, in the darkness, were Steve Clay and Trent.

  It's crazy how life is sometimes. A day earlier I'd been angry at the thought of his shooting baskets in my back yard. A few hours earlier I'd been telling Luke that we were better off without him. But now I found myself hoping he would return to the team. If he'd quit entirely on his own, it wouldn't have mattered so much. But I didn't like thinking that my selfishness drove him off the team.

  I stood at the window watching them play, watching the way they moved in the milky darkness. Steve Clay was different from my dad, quieter. There was no coaching going on, no teaching at all. Every once in a while he'd say, "Nice shot" or "Good move," and Trent would smile, a crooked little smile I'd never seen before. It was peaceful, watching them, and it must have been peaceful to play that way.

  Not that Trent was just throwing stuff up, not caring. That wasn't it at all. He was methodically working on bank shots from ten to fifteen feet out. His jumper was pretty good, too. In the summer he'd shot line drives. Now he was squaring himself up, getting a nice arc, and putting backspin on his shots. And they were going down, one after the other. I wondered where the change had come from, and then a dizzying thought hit me: his shot looked like my shot. He was copying me.

  They stayed for an hour. I didn't watch the whole time. Instead I went back to my geometry problems. Hearing the basketball bouncing outside was soothing, and I was able to concentrate and get them done.

  Around eleven I went to bed. But instead of sleeping I found myself staring at the ceiling. A rush of loneliness grabbed me and held me, and when it finally let go, another feeling—equally strange, eq
ually unexpected—took its place. I was jealous of Trent Dawson, jealous that he had Steve Clay—who wasn't even his father—shooting hoops with him, watching out for him.

  Chapter 8

  Trent was back at tryouts the next day. As soon as he took the court, he handed a note to Coach O'Leary. I saw it, a scrawled thing in sloppy handwriting and in pencil. O'Leary looked at it for about one second, then started sputtering. "What language is this? English? Spanish? Chinese? Nobody can read this slop. Nobody." He pulled a pen out of his pocket. "You go in my office and write this over again so that I can read it, and when you've done that, you come back out and I'll take another look."

  Trent stood stock-still for a moment. I thought it might be over right then and there, but he took O'Leary's pen, and while we shot lay-ins, I could see him at O'Leary's desk, head down, rewriting his letter of apology. Finally he came out, handed the apology to O'Leary again.

  "That's something like it," O'Leary grumbled, after he'd read the letter slowly and carefully. "Although whoever taught you handwriting should return his paycheck to the state." He looked up. "All right then, that's over with. Get out there and play." As Trent hustled onto the court, O'Leary shouted after him. "And keep that mouth of yours shut!"

  You look back at little things and wonder if maybe they aren't so little. I was absolutely certain that was the first time Trent had ever apologized to anyone in his life, and O'Leary had made him do it twice. Looking at Trent, you could see that inside he was all torn up, afraid he'd lost face. It wouldn't have taken much to set him off, and if there'd been a second blowout, it would have been the last one.

  It was an important day of tryouts. O'Leary had put my team up against a team that had Carver, Fabroa, and McShane. No more than a minute into the game Trent ripped down a defensive rebound. He fed me with a quick outlet, exactly the way Coach O'Leary wanted. I raced the ball right up the center of the court. Luke filled the lane on my left and Trent was on my right.

  I could have fed Luke. He was open, and he'd had a big game the day before. But Trent was open too, and he deserved the ball. Or maybe I should say he needed the ball. I feathered a soft pass to him.

  He soared for the lay-in. The ball hung on the lip of the rim, and for a second I wasn't sure it was going to drop. But then it did, and once that ball went through the hoop, it was as if the knots that had been tying him up were suddenly cut. He gave me his crooked smile—something I never thought would come my way.

  After that Trent ran the court like a demon, crashed the boards harder than ever, and swished the jump shot I'd seen him practicing in the moonlight. With Luke hot from behind the three-point stripe, and with me dishing out assists to both of them, we steamrolled those varsity guys, controlling the court and everything that happened on it. Our dominance was so complete that Matt Markey actually went after Luke, fouling him hard on a breakaway and then standing over him, fists clenched, glowering. But Luke played it cool, simply standing up and walking away, making Markey looking so foolish that O'Leary laughed.

  As we walked home on Friday, Luke turned to me. "What do you think, Nick? He can't cut us, can he?"

  "No way," I said. "We're a lock."

  He grinned. "I think so too. But I can hardly wait until Monday."

  We talked about O'Leary for a while, and what it would be like to play for him. Then Luke brought up Trent. "I think he'll make the team, thanks to you. You made him look like a star, and O'Leary likes his aggressiveness."

  "He's good enough, but he flunked a whole bunch of classes last year, and he's flunking a whole bunch this year. You can't play if you don't pass, can you?"

  Luke shook his head. "Not where I came from."

  Dad came by Sunday. He took me to the Kaddyshack Driving Range in Lynnwood. Neither of us is any good at golf, so we hacked away at the balls and talked. While we were hitting our second buckets, I told him I thought I'd made the team.

  "What do you mean 'You think'?"

  "I won't know for sure until Monday. That's when they post the roster."

  He tilted his head. "You know already, Nick. A player always knows. So did you make it, or didn't you?"

  I swallowed. "I made it."

  He reached over and rubbed the top of my head. "That's my boy!" Then, in a more serious tone, he continued: "You remember what I said about the final shot. If you get the chance, you step up and take it. Don't be thinking that just because you're a sophomore you've got to pass to some senior. You be the man."

  After we finished hitting golf balls, we ate fish and chips at the Ivar's at Bothell Landing. I hoped we'd do something after lunch, maybe bike the trail again, but he drove me home. "I've got to talk to your mom," he said after we stepped inside the front door. "Business."

  I climbed upstairs and turned on the Sonics-Kings game. But underneath the play-by-play I could hear the two of them arguing about support payments and lawyers. After about an hour, I heard the pick-up drive off. He hadn't even said goodbye.

  Chapter 9

  I made the team. When I saw my name on the list, I felt exhilarated, but it wasn't like winning a million dollars. Dad had been right—a guy does know where he belongs. As Luke and I stared at the list, it was as if we were both checking on something that we knew had to be.

  We'd stared at our names for a minute when I spotted Trent's name at the bottom of the page with an asterisk after it. "What do you think that means?"

  "Grades, I'll bet. Just like you thought."

  "You think he'll hit the books now? Somehow I can't see Dawson studying."

  Luke shrugged. "Give the guy some credit. You never thought he'd stick through tryouts, either."

  Practice was different from tryouts, and it wasn't just that there were twelve guys where there had been thirty. During tryouts, O'Leary had stood back and watched us play. At practice he had every minute orchestrated. The run-and-gun showtime stuff was over. We stretched; we ran; we did passing and fast-break drills. Then came a chalk talk.

  O'Leary knew the game in a way that no other coach I'd ever had knew it. Double-downs, rotation to the ball, weakside help—he explained all those things you hear about on television but don't really understand. And he explained not only what they were, but also how to do them.

  When the chalk talk ended, we walked through the plays we'd learned. Then we had a controlled scrimmage—which means he blew the whistle every time somebody made a mistake, which was about every ten seconds. After that we ran more fast-break drills, had another chalk talk, and ran some more. We hardly had time to breathe, let alone think, before O'Leary was saying: "All right, gentlemen, that's it for today. Remember, on time tomorrow and every day. No excuses."

  During practice Trent had had to do all the grunt work—the stretching, the running, the fast-break drills. When it came to the fun part, the actual scrimmaging, he was off to the side, forgotten, used only when somebody needed a rest. It made sense. He wasn't eligible, so why waste precious practice time on him? Still, it had to be rough.

  And what happened after practice had to be rough, too. As soon as O'Leary blew the whistle, he led Trent into his office and sat him down at the desk in there. While the rest of us showered and shot the breeze, Trent was in that little room—still wearing his gym clothes—doing his schoolwork. When Luke and I walked out of the locker room and across the gym to go home, he was still there, sitting in his sweats with his head over a book.

  I went home, ate some dinner, did my homework. By nine-thirty I was beat, absolutely exhausted. I lay on my bed and turned on the radio, too tired to do anything else. And it was right about then that I heard a basketball being dribbled in the back yard, heard Steve Clay and Trent talking in their low voices.

  I was amazed. Where did Trent find the energy? I don't know how long they stayed that night, or on the other nights either. Not even the constant thump, thump, thump of a basketball on concrete could keep me awake.

  Chapter 10

  Our opening game was on a Thursday in early December
. By the end of practice on Tuesday my legs were totally dead. As we dressed in the locker room I moaned to Luke about all the running O'Leary was having us do. "You'd think we were on a track team."

  "It's a good sign for us," Luke said softly.

  "What do you mean?" I asked, my voice dropping to a whisper.

  "Simple. Last year's team always walked the ball up the court and ran a set offense. They weren't a running team. Right?"

  "Yeah. That's true. But so what?"

  "Don't you get it? O'Leary's changing his style. Fabroa can't run like you can; Matt Markey can't keep up with me. If we play up-tempo ball, those guys are on the bench and we're on the court."

  My pulse quickened. "You really think so?"

  "I know so. If we show O'Leary we can handle the pressure, we'll be first string by the end of the week."

  I'd been figuring to play six or eight minutes a game. But Luke was talking about more. And why not? In my heart I knew I was better than Fabroa, that Luke was better than Markey. So what if they were seniors? Those guys had had their chance last year, and they'd done nothing with it. Ten wins, twelve losses. It was our turn.

  "You ready?" Luke said.

  I laced up my second shoe. "Yeah. Let's go."

  As we left the locker room, I looked over to the coaches' office. But instead of seeing Trent with his head over some book, I saw a policeman sitting at O'Leary's desk, his nightstick jutting out from his hip. Trent was talking, and as he talked he was shaking his head back and forth vigorously. Both Luke and I stopped and stared. Coach O'Leary caught us staring, which immediately made us hustle out the door. "I wonder what that was all about?" Luke murmured once we were outside.

  When I reached home, there was more. "You missed all the excitement," Scott said as soon as I stepped inside.