The Outside Shot

by Walter Dean Myers

  He wasn’t from the South, but you could tell he didn’t like anybody that wasn’t white. Sometimes he would make little cracks about Mexicans—there were a few of them on campus—or about some of the students from Korea and places like that. They were out-and-out racist kind of stuff and I told him about it one day. He asked me if it bothered me and I said it did. He said, “Well, isn’t that a shame.”

  I saw him in the rec room at Orly Hall and laid my apology on him.

  “Hey, man, the coach said I have to apologize to everybody on the team,” I said. “So, you know, I’m sorry about what happened the other day.”

  “Yeah,” he said, lining up a pool shot, “you’re about as sorry as they come, bright eyes.”

  “My name is Jackson,” I said. “You call me that.”

  “Right, bright eyes.”

  I wanted to punch him out bad, but I knew I’d just be walking around apologizing to everybody again, so I let it lay. I figured my day would come around.

  We played a nonleague game against Grambling, an all-black team from Louisiana. Teufel started Go-Go at center and played Colin and Juice some in the first half. Juice didn’t have a good game at all. He was big and strong but he wanted to play on the outside and Teufel wanted him to play inside. He didn’t like being the muscle and you could tell. Colin wasn’t as strong as Juice but they let him play anywhere he wanted. Wherever he played he looked good, and I figured that unless they got somebody else better, he would be starting in a year.

  I didn’t get into the game at all. I sat on the bench and cheered for the guys as they took Grambling easily. After the game Coach Teufel was to have dinner with the Grambling coach, and Larson drove them someplace off campus. I saw Larson later in Orly Hall and he said that one of the Grambling players was thinking about transferring to Montclare and Teufel was interested. They had a forward that looked pretty good, but the rest of their team wasn’t that much. I told that to Larson.

  “They scout for each other, too,” Larson said. “Sometimes if Teufel sees a black ballplayer that he doesn’t want, he’ll pass him on to the guy at Grambling. And if he sees a white ballplayer, he’ll scoop Teufel.”

  “I thought that Grambling was integrated,” I said.

  “They can’t get the big players, black or white,” Larson said. “That’s what integration does for you.”

  “That right?”

  “The Fat Man wanted to know why you weren’t playing the other day,” Larson said. “I told him that Leeds was messing over you.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “I bet he was ticked when he lost his bread. He really have a thousand on the game?”

  “He did okay,” Larson said.

  “How could he do okay if he bet on us to win and we lost?” I asked.

  “Hey, man, look.” Larson rolled up his copy of Sports Illustrated and put it in his jacket pocket. “The Fat Man is smart money. Guys like that don’t lose. He told me that he bet that we would win but that we wouldn’t beat the spread. That way, even if we lose, he wins because we didn’t beat the spread. That’s smart money, man.”

  “Yeah, right,” I said. Larson made me want to throw up.

  It was the weekend and I found myself in the room wishing we had a television. Weekends at Montclare were garbage if we didn’t have a game. Sometimes, if we had a game Monday or Tuesday, we’d have to practice on Sunday. It was better than doing nothing. Sherry was away at a track meet and there wasn’t much for me to do in town. Colin never had any money, so we’d end up hanging out together sometimes. Sly and Juice would hang out in the city, but I didn’t much go for it. Sometimes I’d play pickup games in the gym but that wasn’t really cool, because it made me look like a basketball freak with nothing else to do. So when Colin came up with an idea I went for it.

  “I’m going home,” he said. “My sister is coming to pick me up tonight. Why don’t you come with me?”

  “How far is it?” I asked.

  “Not far. My father’s never seen a black guy, so I figure I’d bring you home and show him how one looks,” Colin said.

  “You kidding me, man?” I looked at Colin putting some things in his overnight bag. “You mean to tell me your father has never seen a black guy?”

  “Are you kidding me?” Colin asked, laughing. “Can you really sit there and believe that anybody in the country has never seen a black person? You people in New York must have walls around the city.”

  “You know, you’re the second person that’s told me that,” I said. “I always thought that New York was pretty hip.”

  “Hey, that’s an idea,” Colin said. “I’ll take you home with me and then you can take me to Harlem.”

  “You got to be kidding. What would I do with you in Harlem?”

  “Look, what else do you have to do this weekend?” Colin asked.

  “Yeah, okay,” I said. “Why not? When’s your sister going to get here?”

  “I figure she’ll be here in about an hour or so,” Colin said.

  “How come you going home this weekend, anyway?” I asked.

  “That’s about the only thing you do with home, isn’t it?” Colin asked. “Go back to it or leave it?”

  Colin’s sister looked a lot like him. She was tall, almost six feet, and had wide shoulders. She looked at me when Colin told her that I was coming home with them and shook her head, like she was agreeing with him.

  “My name’s Ruth,” she said. “My father named the two girls from the Bible. My sister’s name is Naomi. She’s married and lives in Texas. My father had religion when he named us. Then he had Colin, took one look, and lost his religion.”

  She didn’t smile when she told a joke. Her expression hardly ever changed. She wasn’t bad-looking, not exactly good-looking either. She looked like the kind of woman who would be someplace waiting for you when you got back from wherever you’d been. Her face and hands, up close, looked as if she had been in the cold weather. Her knuckles were red.

  She was driving an old Ford Fairlane that ran fairly nice. You could see that it had rusted a little near the rear right fender and that someone had painted over it with a brush.

  “How are things?” Colin asked.

  “The thyme did all right,” Ruth said. “Everything else died.”

  “Pa thought he would try growing herbs instead of a regular food crop,” Colin said. “Figured that even if it didn’t do that well he could bring it in and market it himself. Seemed like a good idea.”

  “Good ideas don’t grow in that sand any more than anything else,” Ruth said.

  “You think he should give it up and do something else?” I asked.

  “I do,” Ruth said. “I don’t see any sense to throwing bad money after good. Colin sees some sense to it, but it’s beyond me, it truly is.”

  “Pa’s got to have something to do, something to believe in,” Colin said.

  “Even if it’s a lie.” Ruth looked at her brother sitting next to her in the front seat. “That’s all that land’s been since I can remember. A lie about what we’re going to have when he dies.”

  Colin didn’t say anything. He jammed his hands in his pocket, which made his shoulders looked hunched up somehow, and sank into a mood. I had seen him go into moods like that before, mostly when he got letters from home.

  We drove straight through from the college to Cisne on a highway and then took a turnoff Ruth and Colin called a spur, to where they lived. It was almost dark when we reached the house. It didn’t look bad. In fact, it was a nice house except that the porch was higher on one side than the other.

  “We added the porch on after the house,” Colin said as we walked across it. “The house had settled evenly but the porch settled lopsided.”

  Colin’s mother opened the door. She was short, a little on the plump side, with a high forehead and dark hair that had streaks of red and gray in it.

  “Hey, Mom, this is my roommate Lonnie.” Colin’s mother came up to his chest and she was hugging him around the waist s
o hard that I thought she was going to throw him over. She saw me and straightened up and wiped her hands off on her apron before reaching over to shake my hand.

  “Mom always loved Colin more than she loved me,” Ruth said. She was smiling. She loved Colin a lot, too, you could see that.

  “I’m pleased to meet you, Mr. Lonnie.” Colin’s mother gave me a little half bow and looked over at Colin.

  “I figured he could stay in Naomi’s room,” Colin answered. “Where Pa?”

  “In the house trying to feel important. He said he wasn’t going to come out and greet you because now that you’re a college boy you might get a big head. He’s going to feel like a right fool when he sees you brought along a real college boy for a guest.”

  “Wait a minute, now.” Colin put his arm around his mother’s shoulder as we headed for the house. “How come he’s a real college boy and I’m not?”

  “Oh, you know what I mean,” his mother said, looking back at me. “You’re just you, you know that.”

  Colin’s father was where he got his height from. He was a good inch taller than Colin. He was thin on top, and wide shouldered, but he had a pot belly. His belly looked like it belonged to another person. So did his ears. His ears stuck out on both sides as if somebody had stuck them on his head to be funny.

  “Pa, this is Lonnie Jackson. He’s on the basketball team, too,” Colin said. “He’s from New York.”

  “New York City?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “Well, you’re probably the first person we’ve ever had in this house from New York City.”

  “Is not,” Mrs. Young said. “We had that old gal that married the Thompson boy in here.”

  “She had just been to New York, Mama,” Ruth said. “She wasn’t from New York. Lonnie was born and raised in New York.”

  “New York isn’t the only place in the world, is it, young fellow?”

  “No, sir.”

  “But I bet it sure is some place, from what we hear down here,” Mr. Young said. “I bet it sure is some place.”

  We had dinner, which was really good. Colin’s mother had made buttermilk cornbread, roasted pork strips in gravy, string beans, rice, and spinach.

  “When Colin was little, he wanted to have spinach every day because he thought he was going to be as strong as … as …” She made a little fluttering movement with her hand.

  “Popeye,” Ruth said.

  “That’s right,” Mrs. Young said.

  I didn’t think Mrs. Young was comfortable around me. Whatever she did she kept looking over at me like she expected me to be doing something strange.

  After dinner Mr. Young took me around to show me the place. You could see that he was proud of it. The place was big, or at least it was big as far as I was concerned. They had a barn with two cows in it and a small pony they said was almost twelve years old.

  “I used to ride him around when I was a kid,” Colin said. “And I used to change his name about once a month, which always made Ruth and Naomi mad. They would call him Tony, after some cowboy horse, but I would change his name to Pee-wee, or Fast Billy, things like that. He’d come to me no matter what I’d call him but he’d never come to them. That used to get them both ticked off.”

  “One day, when I meet my maker,” Mr. Young said, “Colin’s going to have to find something to do with this place. I don’t care what he does with it, either. He can cement the whole thing over and make a parking lot out of it, I don’t care.”

  “Ruth said the thyme came up nice,” Colin said.

  “It came up okay,” Mr. Young said. “Talked to a fellow about some jars—you know, drying it out and putting it up in jars. He said I couldn’t do it as cheap as they had down in the supermarket. You know what I asked him? You know what I asked him?”

  “What did you ask him, Pa?”

  “I asked him if I looked like a fool to him,” Mr. Young said. “That’s what I asked him. I told him that I knew I couldn’t produce it as cheap as the supermarket. And the supermarket couldn’t produce it as fresh as I could, either.”

  “What did he say to that?” I asked.

  “What could he say?” Mr. Young said. “There wasn’t anything left to say after that.”

  I couldn’t sleep for two cents the first night. It wasn’t the quiet, I had gotten used to that about a week after I reached Montclare. I think it was just the excitement of being there. Colin’s mother jumping around behind him was funny in a way, and I wondered if she had ever worked the way my mother had. She didn’t look the type. His father looked like a hardworking man, though. I could see where somebody could get attached to a piece of land. It was yours, like a car was yours, or like a dollar was yours, but it was more than that. You worked it and it was your job, it was what you owned, where you lived, and what you had to leave to your kids. It was more like your whole life. I could see that a man could get attached to a piece of land.

  The first day we were there was Saturday, and Colin got me up before daybreak to help him with the chores. There were a thousand things to do. We went out and fed the cow and he showed me how you were supposed to milk the things, but I thought it looked a little freaky messing with a cow’s private parts so I didn’t try it. Then we went and took some rocks and burlap off a piece of land which they had put a lot of fertilizer on. Colin ran his fingers through it and picked some of it up.

  “How it look?” I asked.

  “It’ll take another thirty years before this land is worth anything,” he said. “In a way I’m glad that it’s as dead as it is. If it wasn’t, if it showed a little more life, I’d have been stuck going to agricultural college.”

  “Your father thinks it’s okay,” I said.

  “He wanted me to go to agricultural college, but I didn’t,” Colin said. “If the land was halfway decent, I would have anyway.”

  We worked until nine and then we had breakfast. Later we went back into the fields and helped his father turn over some land he was thinking about planting some more herbs in.

  “Hey, man, who does all this when you’re not here?” I asked.

  “Mom and Ruth and Dad all pitch in,” Colin said. “But since we got us a New York City boy here, Mom and Ruth are in the house acting like ladies.”

  “I don’t think your mother likes the idea of me being here too much,” I said.

  “She’s scared to death of you,” Colin said. “She came into my room last night to talk and she told me that.”

  Colin had showed me how to till with a little portable machine in between the fences his father had built for the animals he was going to buy one day. I cut the power and wiped my brow off with my shirtsleeve.

  “Told you to tie that handkerchief around your head,” Colin said. “This sun’ll kill you faster than bad liquor.”

  “How come she’s scared of me?” I asked. “Because I’m black?”

  “Nope, because you go to college. She thinks she’s going to open her mouth and say something stupid and then the whole family is just going to be embarrassed. She’s always been like that. She doesn’t read too well.”

  “That right?”

  “That’s right,” Colin said.

  I went to church with them on Sunday and smiled at everybody staring at me. I was the only person in the church that wasn’t white. When the word got around that I was one of Colin’s basketball teammates, some of the younger kids came up and asked me if I could dunk. When I said yes, they wanted me to go in the back of the church where they had a basket set up and show them, but their parents dragged them off. The truth was, I wanted to go back there and dunk for them.

  The rest of the day went well. Colin and I helped his father fix the door to the storm cellar. The old man liked to have his son working with him, you could see the pride in his face. Some of Colin’s younger friends came around, some he had played ball with in high school. They were all big, strong-looking dudes, the kind that worked with their hands. We sat around and talked and they didn’t se
em much different from Colin. Colin’s mother made a pie and between Colin, me, and two of his friends, we ate the whole thing. When it was finally time to leave I didn’t want to go.

  Colin’s mother told him that she had some forms for him to look at and took him back into the house just before we were ready to get into the car. The sun had just gone down, and off in the distance there was an even band of orange sky.

  “You know, she doesn’t have any papers in there for him to look at before he goes,” Ruth said. She had changed from a dress into gray slacks and a pink sweater and was looking kind of good. Colin’s father was in the house shining his church shoes. “She’s just shamed of hugging him so much in front of you.”

  “How do you like living out here?” I asked as we waited for Colin.

  “I don’t like it that much,” Ruth said.

  “Why not? It looks pretty nice to me,” I said. “You know, back in Harlem we used to see this as the perfect kind of life. I mean, it looks like there’s some work involved with it, but it’s nice.”

  “I want something more,” Ruth said, leaning against the fender of the car. “I want to be all excited about something, have people excited about me for some reason—you know, that kind of thing. Sometimes when I read about the big cities and hear about the crime in them I start thinking about what I would do to protect myself. I’d have all these daydreams about taking karate lessons or getting a derringer, silly stuff like that. And that’d be the best part of my whole day.”

  “So what are you going to do?” I asked.

  “Sit around and wait for Daddy to die, so I’ll have to make a decision, I guess,” Ruth said. “Here comes your star forward. Is he really any good?”

  “He’s real good,” I said.

  “I always knew he would be,” she said. “I really did.”