Playing Without the Ball

by Rich Wallace

  I don’t even know who I was dreaming about.

  New Sneakers

  We’ve fallen into a tie with the Cardinals because of our two recent losses, and we play them tonight with first place on the line. We beat them last time, but it was close.

  Kaipo’s got his team right on our asses, too. I get to the Y early and check the bulletin board:

  STURBRIDGE YMCA

  CHURCH LEAGUE STANDINGS

  As of January 13

  W L

  Sturbridge Methodist 7 2

  St. Joseph’s Cardinals 7 2

  St. Joseph’s Bishops 7 3

  New Covenant 4 6

  First Presbyterian 2 7

  Baptist-Lutheran 1 8

  SCORING LEADERS

  LAST WEEK

  Bishops 72, Cardinals 58

  Methodist 51, Presbyterian 45

  New Covenant 53, Baptist-Lutheran 37

  Bishops 68, New Covenant 44

  Baptist-Lutheran 37, Methodist 36

  THIS WEEK

  Sunday: 5:00 Bishops vs. Baptist-Lutheran

  6:00 Methodist vs. Cardinals

  7:00 Presbyterian vs. New Covenant

  Thursday: 6:30 Baptist-Lutheran vs. Presbyterian

  7:30 Cardinals vs. New Covenant

  Kaipo toys around with the Baptists in the first game, scoring about twenty-five before halftime. I sit in the bleachers with Alan and Beth.

  Alan barely says anything. You can tell he’s psyching himself up, because he’s staring at the court with his mouth kind of hard, shutting his eyes every few seconds. Last year when we were playing JV, he would throw up before some of the games, especially the ones that figured to be close. He said the jitters usually went away after that.

  I’m feeling edgy, too, but I don’t think I show it like he does. I tend to gradually focus in on the game over the course of the day. Right now I’m about ninety percent there. By game time, I’ll have tuned everything out.

  Beth nudges my knee with hers. “Big game,” she says.

  I turn my head halfway and look at her. “True,” I say. “I think every game is gonna be big the rest of the way.” I point out at the court. “It’s gonna come down to us and them,” I say, meaning Kaipo’s team.

  “You think?”

  “Yeah. I mean, who else is gonna beat them? The way he’s playing.”

  She nods. “He’s great. And he’s such a nice guy, too. He never acts like he’s a star. I love watching him play. He’s so fluid.”

  “Yeah. Smart too. He almost never makes a mistake.”

  Alan finally speaks, still staring straight across the court. “You can stay with him, Jay. You might not shut him down, but you can neutralize him enough for us to beat them. You just gotta step up. But that’s two weeks away yet. Let’s think about tonight.”

  Tonight turns out to be intense. I’m guarding Donny Colasurdo, who’s my height but more muscular from playing football. He and I play at about the same tempo, ready to run the fast break when the opportunity arises, but content to set up and drive and play the other guy tight.

  It’s close throughout—neither team can get ahead by more than three or four points. Alan nails a baseline jumper with about six seconds left to send it into overtime.

  We huddle up and I wipe my face with a towel. It’s been a physical game and Alan’s got four fouls. The bleachers are full. The first two teams stayed around because this one’s for first place, and the other two are waiting to play. Plus New Covenant’s got its whole contingent of fans waiting, so there’s a lot of noise coming at us. “Play tough defense,” Alan says. “Fight through the screens.”

  Alan taps it to me off the jump ball and I shield it from Colasurdo with my body. Overtime is four minutes, and I want to use a lot of that clock.

  I dribble outside the arc, then bounce the ball to Robin on my left. I yell for the ball right back and Robin cuts inside. Alan gives me a screen and I penetrate, but their center rushes over to me and I have to adjust my shot. It bangs off the rim and they get possession.

  Colasurdo has a jump on me, and they get him the ball. He takes it to the hoop and lays it over Peter for two.

  I bring it up slowly and they don’t press. We work it around outside for about forty-five seconds, until Alan gets around his man inside. Peter gets it to him and Alan hits a fallaway jumper to tie it up again.

  There’s a lot of passing, a lot of patient offense. We exchange baskets, with them getting a backdoor layup and me getting a put-back on Alan’s miss. They call time-out with about forty seconds left.

  “One rebound,” Alan says. “One defensive stop and then we hold for the last shot. Let’s go.”

  They bring it in. Colasurdo is definitely their best ball-handler, but they don’t have any really shaky players like we do. He dribbles outside, watching the movement in the key, and I know he’s going to take it in himself.

  Suddenly he drives to my left. Alan yells, “Screen,” but it’s too late. I collide with the guy setting the pick and Colasurdo gets past me. He goes up for the shot and Alan is on him, knocking the ball away.

  There’s a whistle. The ref points at Alan.

  “That’s five,” Colasurdo says, clapping his hands.

  Alan’s fouled out. He clasps his hands behind his head and looks at the ceiling. Then he looks at the bench.

  Randy and Josh are sitting there, with a combined scoring average of 0.0. Alan waves Randy in, maybe because he has new sneakers. That’s the biggest difference between them.

  Score’s tied. I grab Peter’s arm. “Cover their center,” I say. “Box out.”

  Colasurdo goes to the line. Peter and I take the inside spots on the key.

  He makes the first one to put them up by a point. The second one bounces high off the back of the rim. I get a hand on it, but can’t bring it down. Their big guy taps it back. Colasurdo is standing by the free-throw line. He comes down with the ball and drives the lane. I’m screened and can’t get to him.

  There’s a collision, but the ball is floating toward the hoop. Beth is on her butt, sliding backwards off the court. The shot goes in, but the referee is waving it off, signaling a charging foul on Colasurdo. Beth raises her fists over her head and shouts, “Yeah!”

  I walk over and pull her up and we bump shoulders. “You are tough!” I say.

  So we’re down by a point with nine seconds left, but that’s plenty of time, and we are going to win. Robin inbounds the ball to me and I dribble up fast. They try to trap me at midcourt but I get through it, take two more dribbles, and shoot.

  It hits. Nothing but net, as they say. I put up my fist and holler, and the whole team comes racing over and mobs me. Alan smacks my arm really hard and Beth climbs onto my back. Incredible.

  The other team is stone-faced and quiet. The difference between a win and loss in a game like this is immeasurable.

  We’re back in first place, and we control our own destiny. We’ve gotta beat these guys again, and we’ve gotta beat Kaipo. And we’re gonna do it. It’s gonna mean something.

  Four

  “Days Later”

  “Days Later”

  When you said you’d vomited

  all day on Saturday

  I wished I could have been there

  waiting in another room

  till you returned

  weak and spent

  but freshly rinsed

  teeth brushed

  in need of rest

  and sips of water.

  I would have fetched it from the kitchen

  with an ice cube.

  by Jay McLeod

  I have this dilemma. There’s Spit, who I’ve been sleeping with, both literally and figuratively, for about two weeks now. Then there’s Julie, who I haven’t seen for that same two-week span and may never see again, but who I very much desire to see. And there’s Beth, who has maybe thrown a few signals toward me and would not make a bad girlfriend at all. She’s certainly the most stable one of the bunch. I wonder
sometimes if I’ve really made a dent in her consciousness, if she ever thinks about me when I’m not in her presence. I’m thinking I might try to find out.

  It’s Monday and I’m watching Spit’s band practice. They’ll be here again all weekend. She catches my eye after a couple of songs and points to the spot next to her on the stage, but I just grin and shake my head. Soon I’ll get up there again.

  Late at night sometimes I have this fantasy that I’m up there singing for real, belting out some great rock and roll songs before a packed house. And then I go into a lounge singer mode, but classy, and sing some desperate love song directly at Julie to win her over. I figure the odds of that actually happening are about one in fifteen million.

  When Spit finishes, she comes over and sits down. “Long time no see,” she says. It’s been since Thursday.

  “It’s been brutal without you,” I say.

  “I bet.” She smiles. “You must have been counting the seconds.”

  I fold my arms. She’s in a good mood. This seems like the right time to break this off. It already feels like it never happened.

  “So, Spit,” I say.

  “Yeah?”

  “Can we … talk about this?”

  “This?”

  “What we’re doing.”

  “What are we doing?” She gives me a kind of amused look, like she knows what I’m trying to do and knows that it’s torture. Then she makes it easy for me. “It’s not like I think we’re in love,” she says.

  “No. But … it feels kind of destructive. Like we’re losing sight of what brought us together in the first place …. And it wasn’t sex and drugs.”

  She puts two fingers up to my mouth and pinches my lips. “You’re getting smarter, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah. I guess.”

  “Okay,” she says. “You’re off the hook. No more sex buddies. I’ll go back to hugging my pillow.”

  “Hey, the human body can go a good long time, remember?”

  She laughs and shakes her head. “Who ever told you that?”

  I wake up early Tuesday and go play some ball. It’s a slow game—bankers and lawyers, mostly—but Dana and I play our one-on-one game-within-a-game like before. I can see that my play has improved, because she’s less effective against me and I’m more so against her. Plus the dynamics have changed a little. I can cover her and bump her without a constant sexual reference point. I can take her on as a basketball player. She’s too far over my head to even think about any other relationship.

  She says she’s jumping well again, having ironed out the kinks. “Five-ten at East Stroudsburg last weekend,” she says. “I’m jumping up at Dartmouth on Sunday. Great surface. I may get six feet finally.”

  She says only five high school girls in the country went six feet or better last year, none of them indoors. “That’s my entire focus for the rest of this year,” she says. “I’m living like a monk until June.”

  We don’t have a game Thursday night, but I’ve got nothing to do, so I walk over to the Y anyway. The Presbyterians are warming up on this end. I look around the gym.

  “Hey, you,” says a very sweet voice, and I see Beth walking toward me. And it isn’t so much what she says, but the way she says it: two very distinct words, sort of teasing, but also affectionate and melodic. Hey, you.

  “Hi,” I say. I feel so unencumbered.

  “We’re up there,” she says, pointing to the bleachers. I see Alan, Robin, and Anthony. “We wanted to call you, but nobody knew your number.”

  “I don’t have one.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. I live by myself.”

  “Oh. Somebody told me that. I guess I didn’t believe them.” She pulls my arm gently. “Come on,” she says, and we go up to the bleachers.

  Alan and I shake hands by punching each other’s fist. He’s trying to grow a goatee, but it’s pretty sparse. It’s as long as the hair on his head, though, which is about a quarter of an inch. I notice that he and Robin are sitting leg to leg, even though there’s a lot of room up here.

  There are no black girls in our grade, and I think only four in the school. But I’ve never heard any negative comments about black guys going out with white girls, at least not significant ones. Maybe the parents feel otherwise.

  Beth is on my left, and I catch her eye and just tilt my head toward Alan and Robin a little and give a questioning look.

  She raises her eyebrows and gives a tiny nod, just a slight bobbing of her head.

  Somehow that puts me more at ease, like if two people from the team can pair up, then it’s not so unlikely that two more would. I check her out as subtly as I can: lean, strong legs under tight denim, a small pair of old running shoes, nicely rounded—

  Bam, the ball rattles off the fourth row of the bleachers because of an errant pass. I jump a little, then laugh. Beth just gives me a look.

  After the second game, we head for the door, and Alan says, “Where are we going?”

  “The church is open,” Robin says. “We could play pool or something.”

  So we head in that direction. Beth and I lag behind, and the others are soon about a block ahead of us.

  “Do you feel like playing pool?” she asks.

  “If you want to,” I say. “Actually I’m kind of hungry. I was thinking of going to the diner.”

  “Yeah,” she says. “I’m kind of hungry, too.”

  “You don’t mind if we don’t catch up to them?”

  “No. I’d rather hang with somebody else for a change.”

  “Yeah?”

  “My parents give me a hard time about anybody who isn’t into church,” she says. “And I don’t have the balls to rebel.”

  She walks real close to me, not with her arm around me or anything, but kind of shoulder to shoulder. When we reach the diner, I ask, “Are you hungry, or did you just say that?”

  “I could eat something. I’m not starving.”

  “Me either.”

  “Wanna do something else?” she asks.

  “Sure.”

  We walk past the diner and she says we could go to her house. So we walk to the end of Main and turn up Monroe about half a block.

  She calls hello to her mom as we enter through the back door. Her mom comes right into the kitchen and says hello.

  “This is Jay,” Beth says. “From the youth group.”

  “Hi, Jay,” she says. She smiles, but she looks me over good. “Are you new?”

  “Yeah. New to the youth group anyway. I been in town awhile.”

  “Oh. And where do you live?”

  “On Main Street.”

  “North Main?”

  “No. By Ninth Street.” In other words, in a crummy apartment. There are no houses on the downtown part of Main, just apartments over stores and offices.

  We go to the basement and put on the TV, but we don’t watch it. She sits about four inches away from me on a couch.

  “What’s the deal with you living alone?” she asks.

  I look up at the ceiling and let out my breath. “They both left,” I say. “My mother is … not real mature, I guess. She took off when I was little, and she never tried to get me back. My father raised me. He’d been talking about quitting his job and bolting to California for years, but he didn’t want to jerk me around any more than I’ve already been. Last year I told him I was ready to let him go. He thinks I’ll be out there with him this summer, but I’m not so sure. He figures eight years as a single parent was more than enough.”

  “So you really live by yourself?” she asks.

  “Yeah. And I work in a bar.” I lean in and whisper, “Don’t let your mom know.”

  She giggles. “I’d get grounded just for talking to you.”

  “I’m bad, huh?”

  “You bad.” She gives me a punch in the knee.

  “So,” I say.

  “So.”

  I put my right elbow—the one next to her—up on the back of the couch. It’s not exactly a
move, but it puts me in position to make one.

  “Can you do me a favor?” she asks.

  “Sure,” I say softly. “Anything.”

  She blushes a little, looks down. “Well …,” she says, “how well do you know Brian Kaipo?”

  A Common Thread

  Julie shows up around 10 on Friday night as I’m setting a plate of french fries on the bar. We’re not real crowded, but I don’t think she sees me. I’ve been finding reasons to be out of the kitchen, watching the door every time it opens.

  I see Nancy first, and my chest tightens just a little, my breath halts. Julie’s behind her, glancing around. Then her eyes rest on me; there’s some acknowledgment. I lean forward and bring a bottle of ketchup up to the bar. “You need anything else?” I say to the guy, who’s maybe twenty-five, already losing his hair.

  “No thanks,” he says.

  I tap the bar with my fist and head for the back, not turning to Julie. The band is on a break, sitting at a table near the kitchen. I put a hand on Spit’s shoulder. “Can I talk to you a second?” I say.

  She follows me into the back.

  “Julie’s here,” I say.

  “Oh.”

  “You think that means anything?”

  She laughs. “Of course it does. You think this is the only bar around?”

  “It’s one of the few she can get into.”

  “Don’t you believe it. She’s here ’cause you’re here.”

  I squint a little, put my fingers to my chin. “Yeah, but why? As if I’m the only guy who would be interested in somebody who looks like that? I don’t think so.”

  She shakes her head, gives me that look that says God, you’re dense. “You really think that’s all there is to it?”

  “What?”