Todd takes another piece of pizza, collapses back into the couch, takes a big bite and speaks through his chewing. “You’re hopeless. Craig Lang was ball boy for Seaside my senior year. He never played against me.” Todd balanced the piece on his mounding belly, closed his eyes, and tried to picture what it would be like at Mac Court this very instant. This is where life has led him: not being allowed to watch his own son play for a state championship. Jimmy and his no-away-game rule. Stuck at home in Columbia City with an old man who thinks ball boys could be movie stars.
“Well, I’s still think this Langy fellow might be from the movies . . .”
They both fall silent. It’s happening.
Hunter: Kirkus has the ball, and he’s beat the first defender, around the second, holy cow this kid can move! Almost clear for the hoop. Ted Brown from North Bend set up to take the charge and.
Craig: What a hit!
Hunter: Jimmy puts it in! Whoa Nelly, Jimmy Kirkus just laid out Ted Brown to put a cap on this game. Brown was moving his feet, and is called for the foul. A good call, although it appears Brown’s the one a little worse for the wear, partner.
Craig: Jesus.
Hunter: Bingo-bango-bongo tonight the Fishermen Faithful are going to party. Break out the champagne in Columbia City, folks. Kamikaze Kirkus has just put in fifty-six brutal points on the way to the 6A state title. The North Bend Loggers want nothing more to do with it! Send it to the presses! The Fishermen win! The Fishermen win!
Craig: Never seen anything like it before. Never. Like he’s working basketball, not playing basketball.
Hunter: The fans have rushed the floor! It’s pandemonium in Eugene! But where’s Kirkus? Where’d he go?
Craig: Kid vanished like a ghost!
It’s after one a.m., deep into nobody-o’clock, and Columbia City is deserted. Jimmy walks home from the high school parking lot alone. He told his pops and the Flying Finn that the team was staying the night in Eugene. Otherwise he knew they’d be waiting for him, couple of stooges in an idling van, and he wanted this walk for only himself. Still, everyone and their mother offered to take him home, but he said no. And they didn’t persist. This is Kamikaze Kirkus after all. Guy you listen to if he decides to speak. Bringer of championship, silencer of critics.
It’s cold, and the frost cracking under his foot as he walks along the river toward Dairy Queen, and then up the hill to Glasgow and his house, seems to be the only sound left in the world. Jimmy relishes it, walking slowly, letting the ice crack out over seconds of time. To him, his hearing still dulled from the packed gym in Eugene—“Call it The Pit, boys”—this ice cracking is the loudest, best thing he’s ever heard. It takes him an hour to get home when it should take less than five minutes. Looks like he’s walking in slow motion. The few people who drive by honk their horns, shake their heads, smile. There goes crazy Kamikaze Kirkus, one for the ages.
The house is dark, the front door unlocked. Inside it’s warm and Jimmy breathes deeply. He sets his duffle bag on the couch and sits beside it. This house smells like home. Dust, wood, and gym shoes. His earbuds, which have been around his neck, hidden beneath his hoodie, are uncomfortable. He takes them off. They’re still playing. He holds one earbud to his ear. “Diamonds on the soles of her shoes.” Song on repeat. He pulls out his iPod and presses stop. It’s the only song on there.
He’s bone tired and sitting uncomfortably on the couch. Slouched so far half his back is off the cushions. He’s still not used to how big he’s become. He thinks of himself as a smaller kid. A Keebler Elf, Dex would say. He is constantly racking up bruises by underestimating his size and running into things. He’s awkward anywhere off the court. He shot up to a six-foot-eight beast of muscle and power in his year alone.
His soreness is a deep, rasping thing. As if each one of his muscles was taken out and stretched to the point of breaking and then put back into his body. Any movement might snap them. Leave him limp.
He stands up with the idea of eating something. He goes slowly toward the kitchen, moving with the exaggerated motions of a child pretending to be blind. He wishes he had turned on the light when he first came in, but now he doesn’t want to risk finding the switch and knocking something over, waking the whole house, having to talk.
In the kitchen, Jimmy opens up the fridge and finds leftovers. Plain cheese pizza: fair enough. He remembers how his mom used to always make them get half the pizza BLT, which Jimmy didn’t mind so much until he was in situations like this—eating cold pizza in the dark. The T in the BLT pizza always let out the rest of its water into the pie as it waited to be eaten in the fridge. Then, when you went for a bite, you got all this ice-cold, watery tomato juice dripping on you. Cheese pizza, well hell, that wasn’t so bad. Cheese pizza held its own. Locked up tight.
From in his pops’s bedroom, he hears the bedside lamp click on. Jimmy stops trying to be quiet—the Flying Finn would sleep through a bombing—and scrapes a chair out from the kitchen table. He sits down and waits.
Big Freight Train Kirkus comes into the kitchen scratching his bed-messed hair. He flicks on the lights. Both men squint. His pops stares at him for a few moments. Jimmy feels it on the top of his head. Brightness like rain. He doesn’t look up though. He’s staring at the congealed yellow topography of his pizza.
His pops goes to the cabinets over the kitchen sink and takes down a bag of breath mints. He’s been cracking them nonstop to keep his mind off drinking. He stopped for good on that flashing-light day he lost Dex and Genny more than a year before. Going to rot out his teeth because of it.
His pops is so big around the middle these days, he has to sit down first and then pull the table in after. The chair creaks and Jimmy watches his plate move out with the table, and then come back in. His pops settles, yanks on his shirt so it’s better spread over his ample body.
“You played good tonight, kid, real good.” He cracks a peppermint. “At least from what the radio told me.”
Jimmy finishes his fourth slice of cheese. He nods.
“Thought the announcer was going to lose his voice.” His pops cracks another peppermint. Sound crisp like a gunshot. “Let me think. Hell, I remember, fifty-six points, twenty-three rebounds, and eleven assists, I mean, Jim-my.” He says his son’s name in two pulled-apart syllables, hoping he can put some goddamn joy in it. “That’s something else!”
“Thanks,” Jimmy says quietly.
His pops drums his fingers on the table. “Hey, let me drive you somewhere, get you some warm food or something.”
“No, this is fine.”
“I mean it. Let’s get you something special. What does a father buy a son to eat after he’s just won the state championship?”
“Really, no.”
Jimmy yawns and the two men consider the sound for a long while. His pops changes his position in the chair, and then Jimmy does the same. These chairs are too small for these large men. Everything in this house is too small for them, even their beds. They have to sleep diagonally with their toes off the end.
When he get so big? thinks the pops.
Am I so big? thinks the son.
“Wish I could have been there, Jimmy. Grandpa too. Would have loved to have been there.”
• • •
Jimmy catches something in his throat. He’s coughing and he needs a glass of water, so Todd jumps up and gets some for him. He watches his son drink, his Adam’s apple leapfrogging the water as it glug-glugs down his throat.
“You got a lot of basketball left in you, Jimmy. Guys on the radio said you’re the top recruit in the country. Said you’d be drafted right now to the NBA.” Todd pauses. Indeed the phones have been ringing off the hook. College coaches from all across the country. “Can’t expect me and Grandpa to stay away from every game till kingdom come.” There, wrapped inside this man-child, are elements of the kid he used to tell stories to, tried to p
rotect. He wonders when was the last time he picked his kid up. Held him, kissed him on the forehead? There had to be a last time. There had to be. He wonders if on that day he had any idea how different the future was going to be. Had he any idea how sacred that last time was?
“Dad . . .”
“Listen, kid, what happened to Mom and Dex, was an accident, plain and simple.”
“Dad.”
Outside thunder cracks and a great rain rips down. The storm the news has been going on about for the past three days has finally come. It’s raining cats and dogs—if cats and dogs were lions and bears. It smears itself onto the big river-facing window, water pulsing in the gusts of wind as if they were inside a chamber of the storm’s heart. Todd uses the weather to pause, to gather himself because, hell no, he’s not going to cry this night. He speaks louder over the rain and wind outside. “We’re going to be safe when we drive. We just want to see you play. Nothing will happen. We’ll take a bus even, if it helps. Next year, I just want to make this clear, we’re coming to your games. We’re not taking no for an answer.”
Jimmy gets up and puts his dish away. He comes back to the table and sits. Tomorrow will be the best day in a long while. But it isn’t tomorrow yet.
His pops tries a different tack. “Coach called but that was over an hour ago. You took your time coming home. I meant to stay up but . . .” He chuckles, trying for levity—no go. “Anyway, Coach said you left your medal on the bus. You can pick it up tomorrow.” Todd lets out his breath. “Although I bet the way you’re playing, he’ll gift wrap the thing and bring it up to the house on his knees.”
“Naw, me and coach got it good. He don’t care if I get the medal or not.”
“Oh?”
“Dad,” Jimmy says with those serious, dagger eyes he’s picked up from somewhere, “how come you drank that night in Eugene?”
Todd is surprised by this, and yet, not at all. It’s too small town in Columbia City. It was a secret, sure, but one he never meant to keep. “Jimmy, it’s a long thing and . . .”
“Just tell me.” Jimmy stands up. His size is impossible.
So Todd tells him, in words more ready than he ever dared to hope. “You know how it is, Jim, you get so good at something that it’s like no one can ever know, you know? And then you’re alone because of that, and so it’s nice to just stop feeling for a second, for one goddamn second.”
“But you’d been good for a while, Pops. You’d already won the title once. Why drink on that night? You could have been playing D1. Gone to the NBA.”
Todd remembers something. This guy Chuck from work came in pale and shaking because the night before he dreamed he had died with his best friend and they both went to hell. The devil came to them and said, Each night you will die a new way, until you’ve died all the ways there are to die. So the first night Chuck died falling off a cliff and his friend died being stuck in a car, fighting for air as it sank into the ocean. It was as terrifying and sad as if they were dying for the first time. On the second night, Chuck’s friend had an idea. They would take turns dying twice so the other person could get a day off. Chuck went first. He died being stretched apart by horses and also choking on a piece of steak. It was terrible, but he looked forward to his night off when his friend would do the dying. However, when Chuck went to find his friend, he was gone. Chuck had been tricked and each night he had to die twice.
Todd shakes his head. The dream has stuck with him: Try and do right and you get the short end of it. Better to just do yours. “Look, it’s just . . . see, I had this argument with your grandpa. He wanted me to get drafted, go to the NBA. Get the money. I don’t know if you know this, but the Nets called.” He looks up into his son’s eyes, sees if this impresses him. Jimmy’s eyes are blank. “And Coach Kelly kept pushing for me to take the scholarship to Oregon, ’cause he’d get a coaching job out of it. But it wasn’t only that. James’d be on the team too . . . I got into an argument with Dad about it. And you know. Going to Oregon wasn’t just going to Oregon, it was helping coach and James too. And Dad didn’t understand, wanted me to take the money and go pro, and he was kind of the one guy I wanted to understand me, you know? Your own father?”
“Were you running? From Mom? ’Cause she was pregnant?”
Todd tilts his head. How can he answer this? He was scared, sure. He was just a kid. Can he even remember how he was feeling that far back? He wasn’t running from Genny, nope, he’s almost sure of that. Even if he had been running from Genny at the time, it wouldn’t have stuck. No way it would have lasted. “No, Jimmy, that’s not what it was.”
He sees his son swallow, getting ready to say something. “Pops, I want to get my GED. Go to college early.”
He chuckles—relief—and stands up too. Rubs his eyes. “I don’t think it works that way, kiddo. The NCAA is tough. You got to be a certain age for playing basketball. You can’t just jump to college and play early. There are rules. I know this new league will be easy and all, but you got to wait. You’re only a junior.”
His son stares at him for a long, hard time. The thing about Chuck’s dream is that Todd would rather die once than twice. Finally he gets what Jimmy is saying and has to look away from his son. Not playing ball—that’s the whole point.
Rule 24. Facts Rarely Help
Spring and Fall, 2007
JIMMY KIRKUS, SIXTEEN YEARS OLD—SEVEN MONTHS UNTIL THE WALL.
The Fishermen team bus had tooled by the wreck at two miles an hour. Jimmy had done what the rest of the kids did. He looked, he pointed, he said, “Shit,” and then he got back to the business of going too far with a girl. He hated himself for it but who could blame the kid? How the hell was he supposed to know what he was seeing? He didn’t recognize the car. It was McMahan’s after all. It never crossed his mind that maybe . . .
When he did find out, Jimmy didn’t go back to school or the team. One night, he snuck out and threw a rock through Naomi’s window. Then he sat in the bushes and watched her father patch the hole with cardboard. He listened to her crying. He waited there, his breath visible in puffs, until the coldness had infiltrated the deepest part of him.
• • •
From home he caught on to a rumor going through town that everyone knew but no one would tell Jimmy. That’s what rumors are, after all, secrets kept from only one person. He’d heard a part of this rumor from a neighbor lady talking overloud on the phone with her window open. Finally, one day, he cornered Pedro behind the gym, sniffing deeply of a sandwich bag full of crumbly green.
“Pedro,” Jimmy said.
Glassy-eyed and slack-faced, Pedro literally jumped at Jimmy’s voice. “Jesus and Mary, my man,” he said, barely able to get the words past his relief, giggling, his ragged draws of breath. “What. What you doing here? You don’t go to school.”
“I came to find you.”
“Yo. Check it, Jimmy, check it,” Pedro poked around in his plastic bag and came away with a small lump pinched between index and thumb. “This is a nugget.” Pedro stuck it near his flared nostrils and sniffed so hard, Jimmy was afraid he’d suck it up. “Look at this, Jimmy, it’s like a little corn on the cob. I just want to put some butter on it and nibble.”
Jimmy leaned in. Uncomfortable but feeling he had to play along. “That’s big?” he asked. To him it looked like a cat turd.
“Hell yeah.” Pedro pinched off a little into his palm, peppered it into the opened corpse of an eviscerated cigarette, and set to work twisting it back up with some new paper. Produced a little splif that looked like it had aged in the cracks of a public bus seat. Despite all evidence to the contrary, Pedro apparently wasn’t high enough. Clicked the lighter. Lit it up.
“Stinks,” Jimmy said.
“Yeah, well. Smells good to me, so?” Licked the end of the joint tenderly. Inhaled again. “You know, you should really try this shit, man.” His voice got squished tiny, all the sm
oke crowded around it. “I mean, seriously, they’ve done some studies and shit. Medicinal as hell. Works for, you know, depression.”
“I’m not depressed.”
“Whatever, man, you’re not in school anymore, so.” Jimmy turned away but Pedro crab-walked around so he stayed in his line of sight. “Listen, you ever think about what Dex was thinking just before he—”
“No.”
“—died? I do. All the time.” Another toke, his voice squished up again. “It’s like, what the hell could he been possibly thinking in that little bitsy space of time? But, he was thinking something. And it’s like, I don’t believe in God as like a rule, but when I get thinking about what Dex was thinking, then I’m thinking damn, I hope there is a dog.” Pause. Full stop. Then Pedro laughed frenziedly. “I mean God, not dog . . .” He laughed till it was unwound. Then in a whisper, “But holy shit, what if God is a dog?”
The truth was, Jimmy almost constantly thought about what Dex had been thinking, feeling, just before. It was all he could do to keep it out of his mind.
“Pedro, what’s going around about my moms, and that doctor, huh?”
Pedro waved him off, the little joint splashing out ash. “Naw, you don’t want to know. Bad energy. Bad juju!” He started laughing again, more coughing.
Jimmy slapped the joint out of his hand. It sizzled in a puddle. “Just tell me.”
“Little Jimmy making a big stink. You want to fight again, cabrón? That was good weed.”
“Just tell me.”
“Your mom was fucking the good doctor, that enough for you?”
• • •
His pops understood about him dropping school and basketball. Even supported the choice. Seemed to him that fate for the Kirkus family was to get everything ripped away and then some. The Kirkus Curse. His pops educated Jimmy at home for the rest of the year. Taught him best he could from a curriculum he ordered over the phone from a lady with a Texan accent, hoping his son would forgive him one day for any gaps in his education.
Rules for Becoming a Legend Page 30