It hadn’t gone over well in Columbia City, though. Small towns carry and distort news like a cave does noise. Could Freight Train Derail Fishermen Basketball?
Nope, playing for the Knights hadn’t gone over well at all.
• • •
Jimmy, his brother, and his mom came home sticky with ice cream to find a little man sitting in a black car outside their house. The driver’s side window was open, the engine running.
“Genny,” the man yelled.
Jimmy noticed his mom light up red at the sound of that man calling to her, and though he didn’t know what it meant exactly, he wished she hadn’t done it.
“Doctor McMahan,” she said.
“Looks like some poor pumpkin met his demise.” The doctor made a sweeping motion with his hand over the guts of the smashed pumpkin laid out on their lawn. The engine tone shifted higher as it worked to stay running.
Genny forced a laugh, started walking toward the car. “You know kids and their pranks.”
“Mom?” Jimmy asked. He didn’t want her to talk to this man. He couldn’t explain why. They’d just got back from eating ice cream until they were sick, Genny telling them a story about a turtle who held the whole world on its back, laughing when Dex then pretended to be a turtle, waddling between the Dairy Queen tables. It had been close to perfect long since Jimmy had any right to hope things could be that way with her. Now off she went, to this stranger.
“Jimmy, take Dex in.” She bent down next to the driver’s window.
Fine, but the house was empty and Jimmy’s basketball was gone.
“Come on,” Jimmy said, already running toward his parents’ bedroom. Sometimes his pops hid the basketball, and his mom would bring it out a few days later, shaking her head and saying, “Look what turned up.” Even though it was a firm rule not to go snooping in their parents’ room, there was something different about today. The smashed pumpkin. His father’s unleashed rage. Jimmy’s hurt feet and how he had lashed back, breaking a vase, and then wasn’t even punished, his mother leaning into the window of some strange man’s car. Some sort of agreement had been broken, and until a new one was established, anything went.
“You look in the closet, I got under the bed.”
“We’re not supposed to,” Dex said.
“Nothing’ll happen.” And to prove it, Jimmy took a step toward the bed. Dex breathed in. Jimmy exhaled out. “Trust me.” He dove under in search of his beloved ball. Dex ran into the closet, laughing with the nervous joy of breaking rules.
They had made a bet while eating ice cream at Dairy Queen. A bet on a game of basketball, of course. The loser would do the winner’s chores for a week. They taunted each other while they looked for the basketball. Then Dex stopped talking, and Dex never stopped talking, so Jimmy climbed back out from under the bed.
“Hey, Dex?”
His brother was there, on the floor of the closet, scrapbook open on his lap. “Jimmy, look it,” he whispered. “It’s pops.”
“What do you mean?” Jimmy sat down next to his brother and together they learned about a man with the same face and name as their pops . . . A man who played basketball and he was good. Damn good. It couldn’t be the same tired-eyed, quick-tempered Pepsi-delivery man who hated basketball—that was their pops. But this younger man in the scrapbooked articles, tight jersey and dorky too-short shorts, was somehow their father too. Freight Train. All those people talking at Jimmy, they hadn’t been making anything up; Todd Kirkus had been good—dang good. A great.
Page after page after page of yellowed newspaper. Headlines that their father’s name dragged across the page. Kirkus Powers Fishermen. Grainy photos of their pops. Freight Train Rolls On. Frozen mid-jumper, mid-pass. All Aboard! Freight Train Behind Another Fishermen Win. Young, fit, and fierce. Excitement coiled in Jimmy’s chest so he wanted to scream. His pops might as well have been Superman.
“Jimmy, look it here,” Dex said at each new, amazing photo.
“. . . holy shit . . .”
Todd “Freight Train” Kirkus was his pops.
• • •
Todd stood in front of the steel-rimmed hoop of his youth. Double-rimmed, you had to have all kinds of touch or you’d be shooting bricks all day long. It hadn’t changed much. He pounded the ball off the cement three times. He breathed deep and then took an awkward shot, as if all the specific parts of his shooting motion had been snapped off and then glued back together, cracks showing. He missed badly and laughed at himself. No one else was around. He jogged after the ball, felt like his organs were a bunch of loose change jangling inside him. He shot again, missed again. There was a prickle along his neck. He came under the hoop and made four can’t-miss shots in a row. By the end of the string, he was laughing, breathing hard. His knee ached, but it was dull, nonthreatening. He shook his head.
“What the shit?” he asked himself.
Basketball was, amazingly, still in him. The more he shot, the more it came back. His baby-hook, his fade away, his one-armed outlet passes so strong and accurate he used to skim Billy Koning’s pathetic goatee from half court without knocking his chin off just to fuck with him. All of it packed away deep, under some fat and age, a little slower, a little sloppier, a little weaker, but still there. And then there was more. There was the joy in his chest at playing a game simply for fun. Good, solid joy that wouldn’t soon be toppled. Same thing he’d been watching on Jimmy’s face as the kid grew to love the game. All other troubles sloughing off in the effort. Active meditation. This was what it could be.
Todd walked home drenched in sweat and giggling like an idiot, his muscles were tired but they sang out. Not forgotten, it hasn’t all been forgotten.
When he got through the door, Genny Mori was on the couch, turning her hands over in her lap. Had she been crying? She jumped up. She was excited to see him for the first time in he didn’t know how long. Ran into his arms even though he was sweated clean through his shirt and smelled terrible.
“Well, hello, baby,” he said.
Todd tossed the ball on the couch to catch her. She looked back at it, and then up at him, and then she pinched his sweaty T-shirt and it all clicked together. He’d been playing basketball.
“Wow,” she said, her other problem forgotten, for a moment.
“Funny, you breaking the vase. Kind of . . .”
“That wasn’t me, it was Jimmy.”
“Jimmy?”
His boys weren’t outside, or in their bedrooms. Then he heard voices—“Jimmy, look it,” and, “oh shit!”—from in his room. He came through the kitchen, motioned for Genny to be quiet with a finger to the lips. Pushed open his bedroom door, a hand, Genny’s hand, on his back. Exhilarating. There were his boys, on the floor of the bedroom. Then Dex leaned back and he saw. The scrapbook about his playing days the Flying Finn had made so long before. Yellowed newspaper and magazine articles, relics of a more promising time. The boys looked up at him with new eyes.
“Well, boys,” Todd said.
“Pops?” Jimmy asked.
“Freight Train!” Dex said.
Todd didn’t punish his boys for snooping. Not that night. He didn’t shy away from questions about his playing days either. For the first time, he answered every single one.
• • •
Later, just before bed, Jimmy began what had become his nightly routine to make sure that the names on his basketball didn’t get worn away by all the bounces off sidewalk and blacktop. He traced over all the legends he had written on that ball he got from David Berg three years before. Re-blacked them with Sharpie so they’d last another afternoon.
Lastly, he added a new name, bigger and thicker than the rest. So big it was impossible to miss.
• • •
A week later, a package arrived without postage or address. On the front was written: For Jimmy Kirkus who is in need o
f shoes. It was signed, The Flying Finn. All in orange crayon, all in lower-case letters. Inside, packed deep among crumpled-up balls of months-old copies of Columbia City Standard were a pair of the brightest basketball sneakers Jimmy had ever seen. So neon they might burn his fingers if he held them too long. So many air bubbles there wasn’t enough oxygen left in the room to breathe. He put them on while Dex kept trying to give them a touch. Jimmy pushed him back with his elbow, said, “Quit it.”
Genny Mori came home to see Jimmy running full-speed circles around the living room, feet blurring in the bright, high-end sneakers, laces flapping everywhere, Dex huffing to catch him.
“New shoes!” Jimmy yelled.
“Come on, let me touch,” Dex said.
His mother scratched her head, still in her nurse’s uniform. “Jimmy, I don’t know.”
Jimmy stopped running abruptly—kid could stop on a dime even back then—and Dex collided into his back and dropped to his knees so he could caress the smooth, white and neon-yellow shoes.
“Ooh,” Dex drooled. “Nice sneaks.”
“Dex, stop touching the shoes,” his mom said.
“Don’t know?” Jimmy sensed a trap.
“Who gave those to you? I don’t know if you can keep them.”
Jimmy wasn’t one to cry, but just then, almost. “Someone called the Flying Finn?”
His mother burst out laughing, a rare, prized sound in Jimmy’s world. She waved her hand. “You can keep them. Keep them.” She shook her head.
“They’re smooth,” Dex said. He looked up to see how his news was received. He was ignored so he went back to the shoes.
“Who’s the Flying Finn?” Jimmy asked.
“I think they glow in the dark.” Dex had his hands cupped around the toe of Jimmy’s left shoe and he was peering into the small cave of darkness he’d made. “Yeah, they glow in the dark.”
His mom smiled at him. “He’s your grandfather, Jimmy.”
This caught Dex’s attention. “Pops said he was,” he lowered his voice into a whisper, “a sand toad.”
Again that laugh from his mother, and Jimmy wished he could figure out the secret to it. “Your father says a lot of things.” She turned, started walking back to the bathroom for her customary postwork bath. “Keep the shoes, Jimmy.” She called over her shoulder, “Keep the shoes.”
Jimmy cheered, kicked off Dex, and started running around the room again to see how fast he could go. Look at the kid in the brand-new shoes!
Dex resumed his chase, yelling, “Jimmy, they glow, your shoes glow. In the dark. Stop. I can show you. They glow in the dark!”
Rule 11. Be Bold
Friday, December 21, 2007
JIMMY KIRKUS, SIXTEEN YEARS OLD—FOUR DAYS AFTER THE WALL.
Look at our kid Jimmy on Peter Pan Courts, taking all comers. Scene could have lasted all night. People laughing and joking. Pulling out little bags of chips, flasks of whiskey, packs of cigarettes and gum and passing them around. It’s dark by now. A celebration. Could have gone on till the break of dawn. Bad luck finally banished from the land.
The moment gets sucked dry though because Freight Train shows up. Mood black as a thundercloud, he chugs through the crowd. He seems bigger than ever before. People move away as he approaches. They’re smart to do it. He’d run them down, he’s so locked into the tracks. Talking stops. Laughing stops. They feel the cold of this winter night as a gate-crasher to the party.
He’d heard about what was happening on the radio, of all places. Some guy calling in to that ridiculous local talk show, The Weather Report. Host, Chris Fogg, thinks he’s some sort of Rush Limbaugh.
Todd Kirkus pauses at the edge of the court. His son has just beaten the Johnston boys two on one. Same kids he played with in his “Shoeless Game,” as they call it now. What a thing. Todd wonders if this night at Peter Pan is going to be like all the rest: something to talk about. “OK, Jimmy,” he says. “Time to go.”
• • •
Jimmy blinks at his pops. Confused. The headache, the nausea, push in to be felt again, sharper for the suddenness of their return. He shouldn’t be playing ball this soon after the wall. Doctor’s orders. The crowd whispers to each other. Spell broken. This wasn’t a different world after all, just a dirty, cement court lit up by artificial lights.
Jimmy follows his pops back through the crowd and the Flying Finn follows his grandson. The people let them through, but they all crane to get a glimpse of Kamikaze Kirkus now that he’s away from the lights and in the same darkness as them. First one holds up a cell phone for its glow, and then another, trying to better see the Miracle Man who’s just recaptured their imaginations. Soon the whole crowd has their phones out. And the magic’s back. It’s a rock concert with no lighters, only blue phones. A convention of alien fireflies. A hundred stars fallen from the sky.
• • •
Carla is there, watching Jimmy. She balances from toe to toe, desperate for a glimpse. Her shift at Peter Pan Market is long over and her father can’t find her in the throng to take her home. She doesn’t want to be found. Not until she’s ready. She is sweating in her armpits and tingling in her hips. She’s a teenager, truly, right at this moment, for the first time in her entire life, and whoa, you better clear out.
She can help him, she’s sure. She can be the thing he needs.
She pushes forward. When Jimmy walks by she reaches out her fingertips, but doesn’t touch him. She doesn’t think it matters somehow if she actually touches him. She swears he’ll feel it anyway.
• • •
Someone is reaching out to touch his arm, and Jimmy snaps. Quick, he grabs their hand before they can touch him. He needs to initiate the contact because suddenly he’s so weak if anyone tapped him first he might topple over and never get up. The hand caught, he squeezes and bares his teeth in a tight smile. She screams—he can tell it’s a girl by this—and the people around her laugh nervously. Jimmy feels animal and injured, powerful and dead tired all at once. He sees the face of the girl. The girl from the store. Carla. Her hand in his. She’d asked him if he was worried about 6A. That’s how people knew him now. A liability. Fragile with the cracks already showing.
“Watch it now,” someone says.
“Jesus Christ, Jimmy,” his pops says.
Jimmy lets go.
“It’s OK,” Carla says and disappears into the crowd.
Gone, he thinks, there she goes, gone.
• • •
The Kirkus men walk to the van, the crowd, the town, the universe buzzing, Look it, now, at our man Jimmy!
Fans, if rich in anything, are rich in forgiveness. Hell, they can be fooled up and down the block, be brought to their knees by the star player who was supposed to be a savior but was a flop. They can get two-timed, subjected to doping and prostitute scandals, rants about how the fans of the rival city are better, hotter, louder—and then, in the very next moment, cheer that same scoundrel they just booed. All it takes is a few made shots. A few won games strung together. With some pizzazz and a bit of hope a fan’s willingness to forgive is boundless.
Jimmy is astounded by this forgiveness. How it’s being heaped upon him now. With the van in sight he knows he’ll make it and so he lets their love build in his chest. He just made it rain on ten opponents. The Nine Games of Kamikaze Kirkus. His pops is angry and staring down anyone who dares to look, but Jimmy’s got these clear eyes and this slack jaw, these open hands and these racing lungs. In-out, in-out. He’s sick and hurting and on top of the world all at once. This is a feeling he hasn’t had in two and a half years. He’d almost convinced himself he’d never feel it again. Didn’t like it anyway. Didn’t need it. But now that it’s back, he’s soaking it in. He likes it. He needs it.
• • •
People in the crowd move only as much as truly necessary to let three generations of Kirkus men
through. Then, there in the back, something is happening with the younger kids. One shows another. A grainy video on a small cell phone screen. That security tape from the gym, after hibernating for three days, is waking up. Some techie kid who’d stolen it figured out how to change the tape into a digital file. He sent it to one friend, being like, don’t send 2 no1 else, and of course that friend sent it to another. And another. And another.
It’s spreading only among the young people, Jimmy’s peers, for now. It is dim and gritty and without sound, but it’s incredibly compelling all the same. There’s this shadow, shot from above. It’s Jimmy. He’s lining up, and then running, running, running. The actual wall is beyond the bottom of the frame, but because everyone knows what’s there, knows what he did to himself, the hit reverberates all the same. Whoever sucked that video off the tape has cut it so Jimmy runs at the wall over and over with no break in between, wobbling and stumbling more with each charge. Then the video zooms in. Just a digital blowup on a freeze-frame of Jimmy’s face as he looks into the security camera. It’s pixilated and out of focus but the black that is smeared on his face is unmistakable.
This video is a huge secret that all of the kids delight in keeping from the adults. They pass it cupped in their trembling palms, one friend to the next. Look at my fire. The video will haunt them. They’ll hash and rehash in their minds how the hell it could come to that. Imagine themselves in that cold gym with that brick wall. It will make them fidgety and scared. However, they’ll still be pulled back to it time and again over the following years of their lives. They’ll search it out on the Internet far into adulthood as the coda on a cocktail party story. Video and story a compulsion they won’t be able to keep themselves from. On the surface it will be a gruesome tale with legs enough to hold anyone’s attention, but there, just beneath, will be nostalgia for a time when first kisses were elating, the future was wide, and Jimmy Kirkus went wild. What if a tale really was as tall as it was told? What would that mean for all those other young passions remembered in impossibly vivid color? What would that do to the life lived now?
Rules for Becoming a Legend Page 14