Rules for Becoming a Legend

by Timothy S. Lane

  “Hey, Jimmy, you gotta beat this fire plant for me. Level eleven.”

  Jimmy took the Game Boy. “Yeah, sure.”

  A, over, A, down, A, B, A. No problem. Got Luigi out right quick. Couple of Italian brothers dodging fire-breathing plants. Jump the problems till there weren’t any problems left. Both of them blessed with real vertical leaps. They’d probably make pretty good two-guards.

  “That’s the tough part,” Dex said when he took the Game Boy back.

  “Yeah, that’s the tough one.”

  Paul Simon sang on and on. Diamonds and shoes. People say she’s crazy. Mom and Pops sometimes looked back at them through the rearview mirror. Dex played his Game Boy, kept his snide comments bottled up. The whole town had stopped everything for his pops. It had been amazing and unexpected. Filled him up. Filled his whole family up. Brake lights of other cars lit up raindrops on his window. A better night-light he’d never known. Jimmy closed his eyes—he could swear he felt the Earth turning—and fell asleep quick and easy.

  • • •

  What happened was the day before the Scappoose game Todd had switched shifts at Van Eyck to help a coworker out. He’d worked the night before, and then did the day too. Basically eighteen hours of work with a nap in between. He got home before the boys were even out of school; around the time he would typically be leaving for work. He parked the van in the usual spot, in their little inlet, behind the pine. Thick branches hid the van. He had the window open, arm out. Engine ticked and cooled. Air—through some trick in the jet stream—warm enough on this day to bathe in. He reclined the seat. He felt worn in the best way and so he lingered there. He drifted to sleep.

  Dex’s voice—teasing Jimmy—was what woke him. He peeked out the window, wiping dried spit from the corner of his mouth.

  “Man, if this whole ball thing doesn’t work out, you can go make toys for Santa.”

  Through the leaves, Todd saw Jimmy hanging from one of the maple limbs. He had soup cans tied to his shoes. He swung back and forth slightly, shaking the limb, trying to stretch himself. Recently, his son had become terrified of staying short and taken it upon himself to help nature out. In the last month, Todd had caught him walking around on his tippy-toes, making himself sick by drinking whole cartons of milk, whispering over and over to himself, “I will be tall, I will be tall, I will be tall.”

  “Shut up, Dex,” Jimmy said, out of breath.

  “Or cookies in the tree house? I hear Keebler’s got an opening for a good elf.”

  “Yeah, yeah, keep talking.”

  “I would, but you’re so short I ran out of things to say.” Dex pulled out of his pocket a wrinkled page from a magazine. He held it up to Jimmy. “Look, it’s cute.”

  Even though it was too far away to see, Todd knew exactly what it was. A month ago, after Jimmy led his team to a second undefeated season in a row and then was named MVP of an elite Nike basketball tournament, Sports Illustrated had published an article entitled Jimmy Kirkus, The Next Larry Bird? In the photo Jimmy stood with his marked-up basketball on his hip. He didn’t look much like Celtic great Larry Bird. In fact, with the hoop towering behind him, it was painfully clear just how small he was. He looked better suited for a spelling bee than a hardwood court. Dex had drawn a little elf hat on Jimmy’s head in Sharpie. Written Santa’s Little Helper in cursive over the top. He’d been tormenting Jimmy with it ever since.

  Jimmy dropped from the tree. He undid the soup cans from his shoes and threw them one by one at Dex. “Shut the. Fuck up.” His brother danced away. Then Jimmy stormed about ten feet off, dropped to the ground, and started doing push-ups.

  Todd watched, fascinated as Dex took in his brother’s rage. One thing about Dex was he simply couldn’t handle it if Jimmy was upset. He walked over to the small pumpkin patch that sprouted on the edge of their yard every fall since Jimmy’s famous barefoot game five years before when Todd had lost it. The pumpkins reminded him of basketballs—being blown up by the earth, turning from green to orange. Over the years he was always finding them mysteriously smashed just when they were the ripest. Goddamn teenagers.

  Dex picked up one late bloomer—now half rotten and slimy—and lifted it over his head. Todd was worried he was going to walk over and bring it down on Jimmy. He went for the door handle.

  Then, instead, Dex called out, “Hey Jimmy!”

  Jimmy looked up. Todd could see his older son’s smile already growing.

  Dex slipped his voice into a pitch-perfect imitation of Todd from that day he’d smashed the pumpkin in a fit of rage. “You played without shoes? I could, I could, I COULD WHAT?” Dex threw the pumpkin down where it exploded into an orange, goopy mess.

  Jimmy started laughing, and Dex continued stomping around. A big, huffing caricature. Todd felt the urge to scream. Spring open the door, shock his boys, I’ve been watching the whole time you little bastards. Then he stopped. Embarrassed already. This was who he was to his sons. Blowing up now would only make it worse. He’d chewed on it all that day and the next. Then an idea sprang to him while he read the Standard’s sports page. Columbia City Fishermen Face the Scappoose Indians, Tonight at the Brick House. It was something unexpected from him—he could be better, he could surprise them all.

  • • •

  Taking his boys to the Scappoose game couldn’t have gone better. As the winter and then spring waned and summer shifted in for its brief turn playing Columbia City, it was clear the standing ovation he received at the game had changed Todd Kirkus. He was more open, laughed easier. He even reached out to his father—who had first spurned Todd’s help repeatedly when he took to the streets after Suzie died, and then, years later when he had been set up sleeping in the supply closet of Norma’s and tried to come back home, been rejected in turn by Todd. In the intervening years Todd and the Flying Finn had seen each other on the periphery, but hadn’t spoke more than a sentence or two. Then in the summer before Jimmy’s freshman year, finally, Todd invited him over to officially meet his grandsons.

  The first time he came, white hair ironed down the sides of his great dome, lost in a thrift-store suit made for a shorter, fatter man, the boys didn’t believe it.

  “Good afternoon,” the Flying Finn said in a careful politeness that was laughable. “I’s gonna come sooner but it’s so long to walk. I’m the Flying Finn, I’m Grandpop.”

  “I’ve seen you down on the road,” Dex said. “With the green helmet.”

  The Flying Finn grinned his big jack-o’-lantern grin, same one he used when he used to pretend he liked eating brussels sprouts just so Todd would give them a try, and snapped his fingers. “That’s my hat!”

  “Are you sure he’s our grandpa?” Jimmy asked.

  Before Todd could answer, the Flying Finn had both boys in headlocks and was pulling them out into the yard. “I’s your grandpop, I’m so strong!” he was shouting. It was a game they used to play often when Todd was small. Strongest Man in the World. The Flying Finn threw first Jimmy and then Dex out into the grass. “I’s just so strong, I’s the strongest man in the world.”

  “Man, you are crazy,” Jimmy said as he stood up, wiped at some of the mud now streaking his pants.

  He looked at Todd for help and Todd shrugged, smiling. “He’s the strongest man until you prove otherwise.” It was strange seeing this version of his father playing at joy. Todd saw that the years out on the streets had got their knocks in as they passed by. Finn was missing three of his bottom teeth on the right side. There was a scar from above his right eyebrow running to just below his cheekbone. He moved in a glitch-heavy way. Steps down seemed to give him trouble. And yet still. Here he was, the crazy fuck, wrestling.

  Jimmy turned back to the Flying Finn, red-faced. “There is something seriously loose in your head.” Todd could tell his kid was being pushed out of his comfort zone with this. He wasn’t entering on his terms. There were no rul
es or boundaries and he hadn’t practiced his moves ad nauseam beforehand.

  “If you looks where I am, you only sees where I’s been, ’cause I’s so fast, I’m the Flying Finn!”

  Still, Jimmy would not bite, tried to play it cool. “Man,” he said, rubbing at the grass stains on his jeans. “You got them all dirty.”

  It took Dex to get things started. “You’re not that strong, and you’re old, too!” he took a running charge at the gangly suit hanger, bulleted him in the chest, and they fell in a mess of limbs, Dex mostly on top but it was hard to tell with the flapping suit coat.

  “I’s not old, I’s so strong!”

  Dex was laughing and trying to get the Flying Finn pinned, but the old man was full of tricks and before long he was on his feet again, strutting back and forth, crowing, literally, like a rooster. “Cock-a-doodle-do!”

  “Come on, Jimmy,” Dex said.

  Jimmy looked at Todd once more, and Todd nodded his head. He wanted his boy to get messy.

  “All right, OK,” Jimmy said, and this time both boys pummeled into their grandpa. All three fell into the muddy grass laughing and boasting about their strength. Todd went back in the house, shaking his head in joy. Just like that . . .

  • • •

  Those visits from the Flying Finn were hard though. Todd had to willfully not think about the day of Suzie’s funeral every time the old man came, which of course made him think of it all the more. He remembered how they were all dressed in black—even the Columbia City sky was dark with thunderclouds rolling in from the ocean—to put to rest this tiny box, painted white. It seemed too small to hold anything of substance. That box. Especially an entire person, especially a little girl who had hidden depth enough in her smile to hold a happiness so big it swallowed up two accidental parents.

  At the funeral, Todd folded his arms high and tight on his chest against the wet, Oregon cold. He was shaking, vibrating, like at any moment he would come unraveled. Genny Mori beside him, slack and out of it. Eyes blurry, unfocused, but put together in a neat dress. The Flying Finn in a suit, old, dusty, and elegant. A used-to-be black, some of the color burned off. Todd turned to his father. Old man acted like he knew everything else under the sun, he should know what to do now for God’s sake.

  “Dad?” Todd spoke overloud. “Dad, what do I do?”

  The Flying Finn turned away.

  “Todd, stop it,” Genny Mori said. She was huge, pregnant with Jimmy, and concerned he was going to make a scene. That was Genny in a nutshell, anti-scene.

  Todd grabbed his father’s shoulder and turned the old man around. It wasn’t difficult. Todd was still solid and the Flying Finn had more or less turned to paper. He expected to see tears in the old man’s eyes. But there were none.

  “Tell me what to do.”

  “Get the hold on yourself.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Nothing-nothing-nothing.” Voice a pile of dried-out wood shifting on itself.

  Todd had the man by both of his shoulders. The priest was watching. He was crying at least. The Bergs, father, son, and pregnant new wife were there, even though no one asked them to be.

  “Todd,” Principal Berg said. “Come on now.”

  “Todd . . .” someone else. James? “Todd, buddy, come on. Come here.”

  Todd kept squeezing his father. He could feel the structure of the old man’s bones beneath his hands. He felt like he could crumple him entirely. Fold him into a paper plane. Let him fly.

  “Todd, honey, let go,” Genny Mori said in that whisper that meant, Other people are watching, you’re embarrassing yourself.

  Then the Flying Finn said the thing that Todd had to willfully un-remember every time the old man came over to visit: “She lucky to die so young, see none of this bad place.”

  Todd let go of this man. He didn’t understand. This man wasn’t his father. Not the same man who pushed so hard for him to be the best basketball player he could be. The man before him was a fraud.

  “Lucky?” Todd turned as if he were walking away, Genny turned too, but then, with a quickness that electrocuted his bones, a speed that the Flying Finn had so long honed in him for basketball, Todd turned back and pushed his father in his chest. Old man flew back and slid across the wet cemetery grass. In the process, Todd’s knee popped. He buckled to one side, limped around cussing.

  On his back the Flying Finn looked up at the sky. Storm was threatening for real. He was breathing fast, shallow breaths. “I can’t get no protection!” he shouted. “Even my own flesh and blood.”

  Principal Berg walked over. “Here,” he said, and offered him a handkerchief.

  “No, you the worse of the lots. All of yous.” He scrambled up, his back a cake of mud and grass, and ran off in a slippery trot that would have been comical in other circumstances.

  Todd meanwhile became concerned with finding out who had been in charge of setting up the burial. “They did such a fine job,” he said between sobs, “I want to give a tip, they did a fine job.”

  “Who’s in charge here?” James said desperately, trying to help. “Who?”

  Todd looked at him, closed his eyes, and sat in the grass.

  • • •

  Now, with Todd allowing the Flying Finn to visit, the old man took his second chance seriously. Each day before he came, he washed with palm-cupped water in Norma’s restaurant bathroom like the giant, bony, wingless bird he’d become, humming to keep his mind off the cold. He showed up at the house reeking of antibacterial hand soap, skin pink, almost red, because of how hard he’d scrubbed.

  On these visits, the Flying Finn did most of the talking, Jimmy and Dex did most of the listening, and Todd sat way back in his chair, watching.

  “You know why I called the Flying Finn?” He liked to ask the boys. “It’s the soccer team. In Finland. I’s the fastest son of the dog of the whole bunch.” He puffed out his boney chest. “Move my feets so you only see where I’s been, and there he goes like he’s a flying Finn!”

  Sometimes Todd interjected. “Oh, you made that up yourself.”

  “Me? No! It was the fans. My fans.”

  “You never had any fans.”

  “Yes, I did and they called me Flying Finn. I already told all about that.”

  The Flying Finn stayed for hours on his visits, wearing out his welcome, but the boys were nice to him, even as their mother strangely ignored him. He cracked them up. He used the bathroom to “Conduct Official Business,” and ran the water full blast the entire time, singing, “We will, we will ROCK YOU,” at the top of his lungs while he stomped his feet from where he sat on the toilet—classic grandpa. And then on his way out of the door, the Flying Finn asked Jimmy and Dex to help him pluck the flowers from Genny’s garden. He was always in love with one waitress or another at Norma’s Restaurant. “FLOWERS FOR MY LOVEYS!” he’d yell at the top of his lungs. And then, in a nudge-nudge whisper, he’d tell the boys, “Maybe you twos will be lucky to have a lady like my Lovey. She has Jesus tongue.”

  “What?”

  “Tongue move so good you say, PRAISE JESUS!”

  If Genny Mori caught him picking flowers, there was hell to pay.

  “You get back here Finn, those are my tulips!”

  “Too quick for you, Mori!” the Flying Finn shouted back, running down the sidewalk suit coat flapping. “I need tulips to kiss the lips!”

  • • •

  During that summer, fighting the mood of nothingness that descends on small-town streets for three months each year, people went out of their way to shake Jimmy’s hand, offer him a free slice of pizza, an ice cream cone. Next year he would be a freshman and all expected him to carry the Fishermen back to glory. Dex thought it was hilarious. He liked to stir the pot by shouting, “The great Jimmy Kirkus is here, live and in person. Five bucks a handshake, ten an autograph.”


  “Damn, Dex, I’m not signing anything. People are going to start asking you to put your money where your mouth is.”

  Dex thought on it a second. “People shouldn’t be putting money where their mouths are. It’s disgusting—you know where money’s been?”

  Sometimes Pedro would chime in, “We got two for the price of one. That’s right, two Kirkuses today, so act quick, supplies are limited!”

  The truth was, Jimmy was hopped up on the attention. It filled a need he hadn’t known was there. He liked the way the girls smiled at him, how the boys gave him confident high fives. It didn’t seem to matter that he never had anything to say, hated holding eye contact. And all this because of ball. If he could just never let them down, then all the love would keep coming. It was a simple equation and though it seemed ridiculous, for our kid Jimmy, who’d only experienced basketball success so far, it was entirely plausible.

  • • •

  Toward the end of the summer, Todd let the Flying Finn move into the house. He was staying longer and longer on each of his ever more frequent visits anyway so it made sense. He slept in the pantry. It was barely big enough to fit the green cot that Genny Mori put in. He slept among jars of jam and cans of vegetables. Some mornings he’d emerge, chin stained with jam or peanut butter, complaining of stomachaches.

  “Goddamn it, Finn,” Genny scolded. “You can’ be eating all night, making a mess of it, sticking your fingers straight into the jars.”

  “A midnight snack is how they say this,” the Flying Finn responded. “It’s so very common where I come from.”

  “This is where you come from, you old goose,” Todd said.

  Sometimes Jimmy and Dex would come down early in the morning, their mom already gone for the day, and find the two men sitting in the kitchen, be looking out the big, river-facing windows, talking about old times. Drank pot after pot of coffee while they waited for Todd’s shift to begin in the afternoon.

  One morning Dex asked for coffee too.

  “Ah, you’d hate the taste,” the Flying Finn said. “Asides, it’ll stump your growing.”