Rules for Becoming a Legend

by Timothy S. Lane

  Then Genny Mori said, “OK, just this once. But pull out?” A permission they would both look back on, sometimes, as a mistake.

  A memory flashed into Todd’s head. Fifth grade. Genny Mori in pigtails running to her father’s car. It was raining and there were puddles everywhere. Mr. Mori—the town’s dentist for the short while he stuck around—was shouting something to her in Japanese and she was ignoring him. Little Genny avoided every single puddle along the way. Her father yelled louder and still she gave him no mind. Todd imagined he was telling her to hurry up, and so she was taking her time instead. Skirting every puddle instead of jumping them, or stomping through. Rebelling. She had seemed so brave to Todd. Brave and sad. He wouldn’t have been able to stand up to the Flying Finn like that.

  Damn, Todd thought, losing steam in the present as he got lost in the past, get it done now or it’s not going to get done. So he pushed in. Then it happened quicker and bigger than Todd thought it could, and he told her, shivering, “Well shit.”

  And she said, “That’s OK, Todd.”

  So Todd said, “OK, baby,” and he pulled her closer and held her long enough to feel the warm wet turn cold. He held her even when he wanted to stop just because of the way she said “That’s OK, Todd.” And really in that moment it all seemed just fine because he knew she thought she loved him, and he thought it might be OK because he could do whatever he wanted back then, even fall in love with this girl. Everyone from Seattle to San Francisco knew who he was. Scholarship offers, shit, those were a dime a dozen. Todd was NBA-bound and everyone knew it. He was bigger than U2. At least in that little green-and-blue patchwork quilt sewed with the seamless stitching of fog and rain we call the Pacific Northwest he was. Goddamn. Besides, who ever got pregnant from one time?

  This was Jimmy’s father as a young man: basketball stud, biggest thing to hit town since Fred Meyer’s department store, and always headed for bigger, better things.

  A month and a half later Todd Kirkus and the rest of the team rolled south on a yellow bus done up in streamers and washable paint. It had been a good season for Todd; he’d led the Fishermen to an 18-1 record heading into the playoffs. There was greatness in the air and Columbia City decamped to Eugene to witness their beloved Todd “Freight Train” Kirkus win his second state title and cement himself as the greatest Fisherman to play the game—even the legendary Tall Firs had only won one in high school, and had needed four great players to get it. Added to this was the heady assurance that Todd was bound for fame and riches. He was the top recruit in the country, famous coaches called him by first name, and it didn’t seem too big a leap to imagine him endorsing sneakers one day. Native son done good? Naw, native son done gold.

  On the bus ride south, Coach Kelly got teary-eyed as he addressed the team, standing in the aisle, holding the leather bench seats for support. “A big couple of days coming up, and—” He coughed. Paused, looked out the window.

  “Hold it together, Coach,” Todd called out. “Can’t have you crying in McArthur Court, that’s for the girls.”

  Coach smiled, looked down the length of the bus, let the laughter from Todd’s joke roll off his back, and then continued. “Be sure to call it The Pit, boys.” Coach Kelly’s eyes sparkled in reverence of the University of Oregon basketball arena. “Always call it The Pit because, because—”

  And Todd interrupted him by starting the team on the unofficial cheer, not letting Coach Kelly find his thought: Three cheers for Columbia City High, you bring the whiskey, I’ll bring the rye . . . and on and on.

  In the early rounds of the tournament Todd was as unstoppable as, well, a freight train. He got his shots in, clean and true; and when the defenses collapsed, he kicked it out to James Berg, a small, wily guard with a knockdown shot who only ever smiled when Todd pointed his way, slapped his back, gave him a high five.

  James Berg was Todd’s best—only—friend on that team where the other players were disgusted by his cockiness. The way he held up his hand after making a shot, bantered with the refs like it was all child’s play, spoke of himself in the third person during postgame interviews and found scouts in the stands to nod at after big plays. James somehow saw through it to the funny, kind kid he met at the community pool one summer when they were both in third grade. They’d debated which trucks—Dodge or Ford—were the best. This alliance despite—or maybe because of—the bad blood between their fathers that had boiled up back when the Flying Finn had inexplicably beaten Berg for a position on the City Council.

  Todd and James going against their overbearing fathers by being friends was a sweet, early helping of revolt. James had been at Todd’s side ever since.

  • • •

  The wins in the early rounds came so easy, Todd usually sat out the second half, scanning the crowd for Genny and giving her looks. After games there would be a team meal and then he’d sit in the hotel pool, feeling weightless. Then, after curfew, he’d slip the assistant coach in charge of keeping watch and go out the service door. It was three parking lots, no roads, hurdling the hedges and crouching behind cars, until Tall Pines Motel—the place Genny was staying with her friend, Bonnie. Two twin beds. Todd and Genny on one, a pissed-off Bonnie on the other.

  “Seriously, keep it clean,” Bonnie would always say.

  “I’m a gentleman, Bonnie. Always a gentleman.” Then lights off and he’d squeeze Genny close, butt to pelvis, back to chest. Hands clasped on her belly. After a while he’d trace a fingertip down her side, around her butt, into the space between the legs. It tickled her, and he liked it when she squirmed. He’d be growing bigger by then, and do nothing to hide it. Then it was all starts and stops, whispering, “Do you think she’s awake?”

  Todd couldn’t sleep with another person on a bed so small. By the time the very first rays of light were escaping the dark womb of night, he would be gone, closing the door softly behind him, back to the hotel room he shared with James in a string of rooms taken up by the Fishermen team. Walking upright and proud along the road—too early for anyone to see him and get him in trouble.

  Then another team breakfast, another soak in the pool, and his father taking him out for lunch.

  “You know who call me last night,” the old man whispered across the diner table. “Larry Brown!” He looked around to see if anyone was listening, like this was a state secret. In an even lower voice, comical and growly, lacing his plate of half-finished home fries with white spit, “the coach for the New Jersey Nets!”

  This kind of talk from his father sank Todd and his appetite. A man who could polish off whole herds of cattle at a single sitting, he only managed a few mouthfuls when with the Flying Finn.

  “Well, we got a lot of offers from colleges too, old man,” Todd told him.

  “Let me asks the question.” The Flying Finn held his fork up, as if the tines were the irrefutable proof to what he was about to say. “They pay you for the basketball in college? No, they pay nothing!”

  Then it was back with the team for a pregame meeting, and later, off to The Pit for a game with whoever the Fishermen were going to roll on that night. Then the cycle would start all over. Four rounds of playoffs knocked back in a line, one after the other, and it made the fans, even seeping out into the general public, giddy drunk on the historical dominance they were seeing from Todd Kirkus and the Columbia City Fighting Fishermen.

  • • •

  On the morning of the title game between Columbia City and a rough and tumble team of boys out of Madras, Genny Mori took a pregnancy test. She peed on a stick and found she was with child in the Tall Pines fluorescent-lit bathroom. Staying there without her mother, she was supposed to feel like an adult; a grown-up. There in that bathroom though, she felt younger than ever before. There it was in faint blue liquid at the bottom of a glass vial: the pronouncement she would forever be linked to Todd Kirkus.

  Never had she wanted to hear her mother’s vo
ice so much as just then; even if it was only yelling in a language she didn’t understand, with a frustration that always seemed outsized. Genny never could relate to her mother—her temper, her perfectionism, her odd need to hide socks full of change around the house—but she still needed her.

  Genny knew it would be a scandal once it got out. The Mori family was different in that white-bread town. They had moved to Columbia City so Mr. Mori could open up his dental practice across the street from the football field. On Genny’s first day of lunch, the kids teased her relentlessly for bringing cold soba noodles. One little girl had even rubbed the back of her hand, thinking her dark color could be washed off.

  She became acutely aware of her parents’ differences from the rest of Columbia City. Dad and his shy, clipped way of speaking English, never making eye contact. Mom and her habit of sitting on the porch of their little house, sucking up udon noodles that never seemed to end, careful never to bite through one because of the bad luck, steam clouding her glasses. People avoided them, even little Genny could tell, and in the end no one came to Dr. Mori’s dental office. It was a stress that showed red in his cheeks and caused fights at home until eventually he left when Genny was eleven years old. She heard all sorts of rumors as to where he’d gone. To run a food truck that sold teriyaki bowls to surf bums in California, to Las Vegas to check coats, to the empty steel-cold bellies of railway cars rolling east.

  It didn’t matter in the end, and Genny Mori decided to hate him instead of wonder where he’d gone. To make ends meet, her mother worked as a line cook at Ling Gardens, a Chinese restaurant owned and operated by a family of Dutch Americans, the Johnstons. They were happy to finally get a real Chinese in their kitchen, never mind she was Japanese. Sometimes, because her friends loved the $5.99 lunch special that included one main dish (chicken or beef), a side of fried rice, your choice of egg flower or sweet-and-sour soup and a never-ending soda, Genny was forced into coming to the restaurant while her mom worked the kitchen. Ate General Tso’s chicken and greasy pork fried rice like everyone else. Chopsticks for a second, for a joke, then onto the cheap silverware, rice by the forkful. Sat with her back to the kitchen, shoulders dancing with the tingling premonition that this was the time her mom caught wind of her being there in time to come out in her hairnet, place a grease-burned hand on her shoulder, ask in that pinched up English to be introduced to her friends.

  And yet her luck held. All through high school, through countless trips to Ling Gardens, Genny had avoided just such an embarrassment. She loved the pure shot of glee, one she would find hard to match in intensity later in life, she got as she ran out after her friends. Escape. Booth left behind, red balled-up chopstick wrappers and fallen rice kernels littering the table, bill paid for, but just barely, no tip for that week’s shuffle-footed twenty-something townie who served them, out into the parking lot, blast that pop, disaster averted again.

  Only once had it come up, and only because of Trevor Wooster—a boy brought into their normally girls-only lunch because Bonnie had a thing.

  “Can you get us a discount?” he asked Genny Mori, like $5.99 wasn’t already flirting with forcing the kitchen to use day-old rice, cut-rate meat, to make cost.

  “What, ’cause I’m Asian?” Genny fixed him with her business eyes—a stare she’d become famous for among her peers; it had made Kent Jackson cry in seventh grade after he’d dared grab her butt—and sipped from her straw. When she took her lips away, she let the back edge of the plastic catch and flick spitty Coke across the table at the idiot. “This is a Chinese place. You know I’m Japanese, right?”

  “No, that’s not what I meant, I meant because,” he wiped off his face. Everyone knew what he had meant, even Genny, but this was her way of skirting it.

  “Let’s just go, OK?” Bonnie said.

  So they went. But the Genny Mori force field had been breached. Even though she talked like a Columbia City kid, could get anywhere with her eyes closed, cheered for the Fishermen since the moment she could speak, and was better at Spanish than Japanese, she was still, at the heart of it, a Mori. An outsider. That little pee vial would rock the boat. The beloved Todd Kirkus having a baby with Genny Mori? The outrage! The indignity! The nerve!

  • • •

  On that same morning Todd Kirkus was found bleary, sit-down-just-to-think drunk in his hotel room. Something in the easy cycle of winning had been broken. He had spent the night before wandering the University of Oregon campus with minibar bottles of alcohol clinking in his pockets and a pack of cigarettes. Rumor spread quickly within the Oregon basketball community gathered in Eugene for championship week that Todd didn’t get back to the team hotel until well after four a.m. With pressure mounting, Coach Kelly had no choice but to suspend him from that night’s championship game.

  Todd’s father, the Flying Finn, an overwound man with a bobbing head, found the coach eating a burrito in the student commons six hours before tip-off. “You pulling the pug on Todd?” he yelled in his slightly muddled English. The Flying Finn owned a restaurant on Pier 11 in Columbia City, and he was known for shouting, “Order up, hot, hot, hot, order up,” in that accent, loud enough for the entire restaurant to hear. He was a tall man with a slim, wiry frame on which his head, hands, and feet looked huge and extraterrestrial. His great dome was balding and his neck was as thin as a pipe cleaner, hardly seemed up to the job. Whereas the Moris were local controversy, he was local color—the Grand Marshall of the annual Scandinavian Day Parade.

  Coach Kelly decided that the loud accent was decidedly less charming in this context. “You mean ‘plug,’ Mr. Kirkus?” A bit of hot refried beans dribbled down his chin. He wiped it off with the back of his hand. “You mean I’m pulling the plug on Todd?”

  The Flying Finn hopped from side to side in anger over being corrected. He was a relentless promoter of his son. Filming every single game and sending tapes off to college coaches with masking tape labels that said things like, The Best Ever, or, This WILL Change Your Life, he was a fixture on the sidelines. Yelling for his boy to get more touches. Screaming at the refs to open their eyes already. The sight of his Adam’s apple running up and down that skinny neck, pushing out his extraordinarily loud voice, gave Coach Kelly nightmares, literal nightmares. His wife often told him he needed better work/life balance.

  “You know what I mean,” the Flying Finn said. “You know what I’s saying.”

  “He was caught drinking, Mr. Kirkus.” Coach Kelly tried to stay calm but it was hard. He was uncomfortable. First of all he also desperately wanted Todd to play. He doubted the Fishermen could win without him. Second, the beans he’d wiped off on his hand looked like smeared shit. Coach Kelly was stone-featured and could have been handsome if he hadn’t known he was so close to being handsome. As it was, he was hyper self-aware, and anything he sensed compromising his appearance bothered him to no end. “It’s a team rule, Mr. Kirkus. It’s against the law in fact. He’s underage.”

  “After all my son does for you, you will pull the plug?” The Flying Finn emphasized “plug” heavily and Coach Kelly felt the mist of his spit settle on his face.

  “Again, it’s a policy, nothing doing.” Then quickly, hoping he could pass it off as more normal than he knew it to be, Coach Kelly dipped his head down and licked the back of his hand to get the shit-seeming beans off. “There’s no wiggle room on this.”

  “You lick your hand when you talking to me? What kind of thing is this? Some insult I don’t know?”

  As always, the Flying Finn was practically shouting, and this drew the attention of the other eaters in the commons. Coach Kelly’s face heated up. He took a napkin and dried off his hand. “There were beans, and it looked like—well.” His words curled in on themselves, as if heated from beneath. He stood up. “I need to get going, Mr. Kirkus. I’m sorry there isn’t more I can do.”

  The Flying Finn called after him, “Who told on my son? I like to know
that!”

  Coach Kelly hurried out of the commons. He knew the answer to the Flying Finn’s question of course, and it broke his heart.

  • • •

  It had all been so typical. She was sick in the mornings, her feet were swollen, and her sense of taste seemed to be flaring up around certain foods. She told Bonnie about it and her best friend said, “Maybe you’re preggers.”

  So Genny said, “Stop being a bitch.”

  Then Bonnie said, “So says the bitch.”

  And they teased back and forth but the idea stuck. Genny Mori bought her home pregnancy test at Mike’s Kwiki-Mart three blocks from their motel. It was behind the counter and she finally got the guts to ask for it in a lull between customers.

  “I want that one there,” she said, pointing to the one on sale.

  The clerk’s eyes darted to her forehead, as if he could discover her age stamped there. He bit his bottom lip. “Anything else?” he asked.

  Genny glared at him. Noticed the tufts of hair at his ears. The tired folds beneath his eyes. “Cigarettes,” she said. “Give me some of those.”

  He snorted, not as shocked as she hoped he would be. He rang her up, put the test in a paper sack. “You come back when you’re old enough for those smokes.”

  Later, when she discovered she was pregnant, her fingers shaking and wet and gross—because when the hell do you ever practice pissing into a small cup without wetting your fingers?—she also discovered that what she’d always thought she’d do with a baby in her belly, she could never actually do now that there really was a baby in her belly.

  A part of her even thought that getting pregnant might be a good thing. It wouldn’t be long until Todd blew the lid off the NBA and she moved far away from the Oregon coast with its shiny, spiderweb fingers that spread into places they had no right to go, rotting everything—her father’s confidence, her mother’s happiness, and her, just her her-ness. The baby would bind her and Todd together, and she wouldn’t be left behind. Something deep in her bones awoke and all at once a part of her wanted a family. And she wanted out. It still didn’t seem like good news exactly, but it did have some of the same coloring.