American Masculine

by Shann Ray

  Places bound by ice and snow. Places he’s never gone.

  The drive is too long, the car unwieldy. He angles the rearview mirror, stares at her. Who am I, he whispers, to receive you? None of us is worthy. Not one. In the parking lot he jams the car into park, leaves the door open, lifts her, and runs awkwardly to the entrance. He takes large strides into the electric hum of the emergency room. He holds her body like fine cloth. He makes demands and he is taken with her quickly down a hall to where he lays her down and watches as she is wheeled, white-sheeted, through chrome-plated doors, and he seats himself until he’s given word, late, that she is critical but stable, and he goes to where she sleeps in her clean, well-lit room that overlooks the city and he doesn’t sleep, he prays. He holds her hand, and prays.

  —for Lafe Haugen, Russell Tallwhiteman, and Blake Walksnice

  WHEN WE RISE

  “The light shines in the darkness …”

  —John 1:5

  OUTSIDE, THE SNOW came down slow and soft, the same big flakes they’d seen for the last few hours, everything white and new, the world like a dream. Shale sat with Drake in one of the big red booths at Steer Inn as they waited for food. Shale was forty, Drake thirty-six, both a long way from competitive basketball days, yet in his mind Shale was lining up the seams of the ball to the form of his fingers. He saw the rim, the follow-through, the arm lifted and extended, a pure jump shot with a clean release and good form. He saw the long-range trajectory and the ball on a slow backspin arcing toward the hoop, the net waiting for the swish. A sweet jumper finds the mark, he thought, a feeling of completion and the chance to be face-to-face not with the mundane but with the holy.

  THOUGH HE HADN’T PLAYED actively for years he still kept two well-worn basketballs in the backseat of his car, one his own, the other he’d taken from Weston’s room nineteen years ago after the death. Staring at Drake eating a hamburger Shale was struck by how similar Drake’s features were to Weston’s, just older and more full of lines. In fact, the easy eyes and open face began to work on Shale until he was convinced he needed to go out and shoot tonight, even in this snow, a longing that was rare anymore.

  Shale retrieved the basketballs and they got in Drake’s old Jeep Grand Cherokee and drove until they were down in the side streets south of Wellesley, west of Shadle, among the small square houses. Shale was looking for two cheap portable baskets set near to each other in the street, a sight more common in the older parts of the city than the suburbs. Ten minutes later he found them: two baskets only a couple of houses apart, stark in the night quiet, tall angular bodies with thin fan backboards for heads, and heavy nets like thick white beards full of snow. Drake was a graphic artist, Shale an English teacher; they had full lives and real families and their jobs could be stressful. Shale had felt depressed in recent years, lonelier than he was willing to admit, though he had mentioned it to Drake. They were grown men, they’d been friends for ten years, and tonight they were going out in midwinter for basketball.

  Drake drove the big Jeep up close and shone the lights on the two hoops. One shot for each of them, one long jumper sent airborne to hit the net just right and send the snow flying. Outside over the hood Shale said, “This is the ritual.” He threw Drake a basketball. “See if you can make it with the pressure on, only one chance to win, everything on the line. If you do, all the snow flies at once. It’s beautiful.”

  “I bet it is,” Drake said as he eyed the basket closest to him.

  “You only get one, though. One shot to win it all. If you miss, you get nothing.”

  “Yeah, okay,” said Drake. “I get it.”

  But Shale didn’t think Drake got it. He’s not serious enough, he thought. He’s too happy.

  They took their positions, Shale at the far hoop, Drake nearer the Jeep.

  “Take a deep one,” Shale called. “Gets the best effect.”

  They were both talented ballplayers at one time, but life was life now, thought Shale. Painful how it seemed there were no real games left, or no games allowed. In tandem from twenty-five feet out, from separate places at separate hoops, they let it ride, two dark orbs that glinted high in the air and came down swift and sure.

  THERE IS A HIGHWAY, the interstate east through Idaho, where dawn is a light from the border on, from the passes, Fourth of July, and Lookout, a light that illumines and carries far but remains unseen until he closes his eyes and he crests the apex under the blue “Welcome to Montana” sign, riding the downslant to a wilderness more oceanic than earthlike, a manifold vastness of timber, the trees in wide swells and up again in lifts that ascend in swaths of shadow and the shadow of shadows until the woodland stops and the vault of sky becomes morning. Weston, alone and in their father’s car, sped from the edge of that highway in darkness and blew out the metal guardrail and warped the steel so it reached after the car like a strange hand through which the known world passes, the heavy dark Chevelle like a shot star, headlights that put beams in the night until the chassis turned and the car became an untethered creature that fell and broke itself on the valley floor. The moment sticks in Shale’s mind, always has, no one having seen anything but the aftermath and silence, and down inside the wreckage a pale arm from the window, almost translucent, like a thread leading back to what was forsaken.

  So common for Montana, driving the passes in winter, and so unnecessary, Shale thought. Even if it was a half-baked offer from the Supersonics, in Seattle, saying they’d take a look at Weston if he’d get himself over there. And did the family think of flying him? No chance. No money, and Shale thought, now we’d give anything.

  DRAKE’S SHOT TOOK a flat arc, missed, and rolled to a stop. Shale’s ball clanged too and caromed across the street.

  “Oh well,” Drake said.

  “So much for that,” said Shale.

  They retrieved the basketballs and missed three or four more times, banging out holes in the ring of snow around the rim and dislodging some from the net. Finally they each rattled one in, but the effect was gone. This being Drake’s first time, Shale could see it was nothing to him, just something to pass the evening, and Shale wished he could convince Drake how special it is when you hit it on the first try. Either that or be more like Drake himself, less bound by things. Then a person wouldn’t have to feel the emptiness.

  IN THE EARLY 80s Weston was a six-foot-four leaper, some said the best in the west, often compared to players from teams famous for high flyers such as UNLV and Jarvis Basnight, and earlier, Louisville with Dr. Dunkenstein (Darrel Griffith), and Houston with Clyde the Glide, Michael Young, and the other names notorious to Phi Slamma Jamma. Weston was a swing-man slasher with a forty-five-inch vertical. He went over three men in a game against University of the Pacific, full speed on a dead run from the left wing to the lane as he launched off one foot, cupped the ball high in the tomahawk, spread his legs wide, and brought it down on top of all of them. His head hit the backboard, sent a gasp through the crowd of six thousand, and messed his hair up some. He walked to the line, brushing it off as he matted his hair back down, nonchalant.

  “That was the best dunk I’ve ever seen,” Shale told him in the locker room.

  Weston had come from the shower, a white towel around his waist. He turned his back to Shale and pointed to a cut beneath the shoulder blade, a clean red line. “Backboard,” he said, an indication of how high he’d really gone.

  That sort of thing made the young players worship him, but Weston was quiet when it came down to it. Always quiet with regard to himself, thought Shale, though he knew Weston’s gift was something most people had never before witnessed and would likely never see again.

  Shale and Weston were both stick thin. The family itself was distant, but basketball held the brothers together. As a boy Shale felt they existed in a nearly rootless way, he and Weston like pale windblown trees in a barren land. Their father’s land to be precise, the land of a high school basketball coach. He led the family to Alaska and back, then crisscrossed Montan
a, moving seven times before Shale was fourteen, in pursuit of the basketball dynasty—the team that would reach the top with Shale’s dad at the helm and make something happen that would be remembered forever. His father had been trying to accomplish that since before Shale was born and it got flint hard at times, the rigidity of how he handled things.

  “LET’S TRY AGAIN,” Drake said, and Shale agreed as he stared out the side window.

  “Where to?” Drake said.

  Shale motioned in a circle. “Should be some close by.” They drove for thirty minutes on a slow pace as they checked up and down the cross streets and found nothing, just singular hoops here and there until they rounded the corner of L Street all the way west by Highland Drive. Here they saw two hoops again, though much farther apart, nearly an entire block between them. “Good enough,” said Shale, and Drake lined up the car lights.

  “I’ll take the far one,” Shale said, and he walked until he was positioned where he wanted to be, solitary, in the distance. He had felt down while driving, almost like giving up, but now that he was outside he felt all right. So far from the car it was mostly dark. The net was perfect, filled with white, and atop the rim a thick ring of snow was set like a crown in the naked light.

  “Ready?” Drake called.

  “Ready,” Shale answered.

  From deep back again they lofted their jumpers, Drake’s ball a flash of light caught in the car’s headlights, Shale’s a shadow in the far darkness.

  BY THE TIME Shale reached high school, both he and Weston had the dream, Weston already on his way to the top, Shale two years younger and trying to learn everything he could. They’d received the dream first from their father, then from the rez, the Northern Cheyenne rez in southeast Montana—and they’d both lost it late. Both made it to the D-1 level, both had opportunity to play overseas, but neither made the league. Close—Weston had died on his way to Seattle for his shot at the NBA; and Shale two years later, numb but with an anger that was making him great, had developed a deep jumper, a vertical nearly as high as Weston’s, and rez-style moves. He had a slim chance with the Phoenix Suns organization in an L.A. summer league, but nothing came of it.

  After Weston died, Shale spent the early years trying to remember the good things. The two state championships in Livingston at Park High, one first as a sophomore with Weston, then two years later as a senior with his own group, a band of runners, Indian-style, that averaged nearly ninety points a game. They took the title in what sportswriters still refer to as the greatest game in Montana history, a 99–97 double-overtime thriller in ‘85 at Montana State, the Brick Breeden Fieldhouse, the Max Worthington Arena, before a crowd of ten thousand.

  Shale would take himself down inside the dream, chest pressed to the back of the seat, as he stared out the back of the bus. The postgame show was blaring over the loudspeaker, everyone still whooping and hollering. “We’re comin home!” the radio man yelled, “We’re coming home!” and from the wide back window Shale saw a line of cars miles long and lit up, snaking from the flat before Livingston all the way up the pass to Bozeman. Weston was back there, following him, alive. The dream of a dream, the Blackfeet and the Crow, and the Northern Cheyenne, the white boys, the enemies and the friends, the clean line of basketball walking them out toward skeletal hoops in the dead of winter, the hollow in their eyes lonely, but lovely in its way.

  THEIR SHOOTING ARMS were in the air and they were hopeful, but Drake and Shale failed again and Shale took it hard, each new miss shaking the standard, the misses reminding him how difficult it is to recapture what’s been lost, perhaps impossible. On Drake’s fifth attempt he made the shot, Shale on his seventh. “I used to be a shooter,” Shale said.

  “Oh well,” Drake said. “We can’t stop on that note.”

  “All right,” Shale said, but he didn’t feel like going on.

  They got in the car and Drake said, “Where to now?” again, and Shale looked over and said, “To the east side,” and even as they turned east on Wellesley and headed for Hilyard, the poor side, the black, seemingly desperate side of town, Shale knew they’d find plenty of good hoops and he felt at home coming this way. He and Weston played most of their lives with Indians in Montana, Crows and Cheyennes, Blackfeet, Assiniboine-Sioux; and most of their college and postcollege years they’d played with a black-white mix, mostly black with a little white; he’d been in gyms in L.A. when he was the only white boy there. More often than not in those years, Shale felt black himself, and mourning his brother he suspected some vast core of blackness in Weston when he considered Weston’s huge vertical and how he could defend and score. It was a joke both black and white kept alive: anyone that had moves or could jump out of the gym was black, no matter the skin color. Anyone that couldn’t was white.

  A few blocks beyond Nevada on the east side of town the sky was still filled with snow and as they turned down a side street they found a country all its own, a basketball country with its own citizens—nearly every house had a hoop in the street, a multitude of tall metal structures from here to the vanishing point.

  “Wow.” Drake’s mouth was open. “Shooter’s paradise.”

  “I know,” said Shale.

  Shale held Weston’s basketball in his hands, the smooth leather a feeling for which he never grew weary. “Strange,” Drake said.

  “What?”

  “Look at that.” He motioned to the nearest hoop. Little snow in the net, and little on the rim. And every hoop nearby the same. “People playing, even this late?” Drake ventured.

  “Yep.” Shale stared down the street. “Turn the car off,” he said.

  Drake did and Shale rolled down the window. “Hear that,” Shale said.

  “I do,” said Drake. “Basketballs, bouncing.” “People laughing,” said Shale.

  Drake started the engine and they drove past a small pickup game in the park, even now, past midnight, and saw in the side streets groups of two or three shooting, scoring, defending. “Unreal,” Drake said.

  “Keep going,” said Shale, and they came to a dark street and when they positioned the car lights and turned off the engine all was quiet. Two baskets stood next to each other, side by side, not twenty feet apart. Even now, he could lose focus when thoughts of Weston came up. Bright-lit hoops. Behind and to the side only darkness.

  They sat in the heat of the car and stared out. Shale was seventeen years old, alone in his tiny bedroom in the single-wide trailer in Livingston, warm under a weight of quilts as he thought of Weston, and home.

  OUT IN THE NIGHT the snow falls and casts small shadows on the wall. In the main part of the trailer the woodstove burns. Shale is a senior at Park High. It is deep winter, a thin smell of smoke in the air, the sharp scent of pine faint through his window from the outside. He isn’t sleeping. He smells the oil of his hands in the leather of the basketball near his head. He’s too small, they say, Old Man Mitchell at the drugstore, Evans down at the school. Say he’ll never make it, but he doesn’t care. He’s just missing the rez, Northern Cheyenne, and he wishes he could bring it to Park High, or at least Lafe Haugen, or Russell Tallwhiteman, or Richard American Horse, or maybe Blake Walksnice with his little side push shot that hits the net in a fast pop because it flies on a straight line, lacking any arc.

  Last time his dad discovered him he shook Shale by the shoulders, yelled at him, and grounded him to his bedroom for a week. He’s no match for his dad, but when Shale creeps to the living room, and draws back the curtain of the main window, and sees how pure the night is, how good and right the snow, inside him everything grows calm. On such a night, he has to go. Weston is thirty miles away in Bozeman at MSU, playing for the Bobcats. He wishes Weston was here. The snow is endless, the flakes big and white. A sparkling wedge of frost fills the lower left corner of the windowpane. The rusted out Chevelle is in the drive outside the trailer.

  The trailers are dark rectangular boxes in two long rows. Shale drives south on an open roadway soft with fallen snow. Above
him in the distance the freeway carries fast-moving cars, frontlit with fans of light, and he wonders where they are going. He passes beneath them toward the city’s heart as he carves clean wheel lines all the way to E Street, to the sheriff’s station and the schoolyard. He turns into the playground and drives slowly over the virgin snow. He trains the headlights on the rim. He parks the car. With his foot he clicks the high beams and everything is so brilliant he shudders.

  At Eastside, both low end and high end have square metal backboards marked by quarter-sized holes to keep the wind from knocking the baskets down. Livingston is the fifth-windiest city in the world. The playground has a slant to it that makes one basket lower than the other. The low end is nine feet ten inches high, and they all come here to throw down in the summer. Too small, they say, but they don’t know. Inside outside, between the legs, behind the back, cross it up, skip to my lou, fake and go, doesn’t matter, any of these lose the defender. Then Shale rises up and throws down. Shale and the other ballers rigged a breakaway on the rim, and because of the way they hang on it in the summer, their hands get thick and tough. They can all dunk now, so the breakaway is a necessity, a spring-loaded rim made to handle the power of power dunks. It came into being after Darrel Dawkins, nicknamed Chocolate Thunder, broke two of the big glass backboards in the NBA. On the first one Dawkins’s force was so immense the glass caved in and fell out the back of the frame; on the second, the glass exploded and everyone ducked their heads and ran to avoid the shards that flew from one end of the court to the other. Within two years every high school in the nation had breakaways, and Shale and his friends convinced their assistant coach to give them one so they could put it up on the low end at Eastside.