Rules for Becoming a Legend

by Timothy S. Lane

  • • •

  The Flying Finn never came back after the funeral for Dex and Genny Mori. He had been mumbling something about catching up on training when he rode off on his bike. Suit coat flapping. No one bothered looking for him. It wasn’t the first time the man had disappeared.

  • • •

  Jimmy stayed in gym shorts and sweatshirts day in, day out. Slept whenever he could. Thought about his brother dying so young, about his mom sleeping with some doctor from Seaside. His whole life she’d felt apart from him. Like it was a favor that she gave birth to him, nothing more. She pushed him away and yet died fucking some stranger. It was a bile-laced rage he felt toward her, made all the more acidic by the fact that he would never be able to call her out on it.

  Day in and day out he felt himself sinking into a depression that was big and black and without a bottom. He felt as though each day was dragging him nearer to the edge and at any moment he could go over. And that would be a relief. But the edge always moved farther off. There was always a lower way to feel. He didn’t touch a basketball. He ate, he slept, and he studied with his pops.

  And, oh yes, he grew.

  Grew huge. Enormous. A tree among grasses. A lion among cats. A Big-Gulp among eight-ounce cans. Wide like Dex but taller and quicker still. Those damn Kirkus genes. Late to the party, but ready to party nonetheless.

  Then, finally, seven months into this self-exile, his pops couldn’t take it anymore. Couldn’t bear to see his son drifting so much. Remembered about the pain he felt walking away from basketball and not looking back. All that trouble, and for what? He tried something he thought drastic. He told the kid, “I hear basketball’s starting up. You could go shoot around. Just go check out a practice. Just because. Just to see. You’re set to go back to school tomorrow anyway. And. Well. Dex would have wanted you to. I mean, can’t just stay inside all day every day for the rest of your life, right?”

  So Jimmy went.

  Just to check it out.

  Rule 25. Leave on Your Terms, Never Theirs

  Sunday, March 9, 2008

  JIMMY KIRKUS, SIXTEEN YEARS OLD—EIGHTY-THREE DAYS AFTER THE WALL.

  The rains have been on for two days straight. Jimmy’s brought Columbia City their first championship in years and yet the town is threatening to slough off into the river. With good comes bad. Gray streaks across the atmosphere muddling everything the same color. Rumors are lighting through town that the Coast Guard could be called in soon to evacuate. Those alive who remember the 1938 flood prophesy doom. The rivers on both sides, Youngs and Columbia, are hopped up on rain and wind, giddy to take a stumble through town, pop off parked cars and houses like a drunk does trash cans on his walk home from the bar. Clouds that start in the sky don’t end until they’re hovering over mailboxes.

  Jimmy, his pops, and the Flying Finn sit in the living room and watch the downpour. Power’s been out, so they just talk—or not. The phone’s been ringing off the hook and cars honk wildly as they drive slowly past, wading through the torrent of rain water washing down Glasgow Street. Sometimes the cars stop in front of the Kirkus house and people fire bottle rockets from the windows to explode damply in the gray air. They call out, shake their fists in pride, and blow off-key blasts from cardboard party trumpets—charge! Jimmy “Kamikaze” Kirkus is the toast of the town.

  There was to be a party at Tapiola Park for all of Columbia City to celebrate the state title—bonfire and a band, hundreds of hotdogs and generic-brand pop—but this is canceled due to the weather. Twenty or so people still show up. They end up dancing in the mud, drinking straight from bottles poorly hidden in paper sacks that melt away in the rain. The cops come to break it up a couple hours later. Find a handful of men and women drunk, in various states of undress, shivering and singing bits of the high school’s song: “Hail to thee our alma mater . . .”

  The rain doesn’t quit until it’s fed Youngs River and her evil big brother the Columbia strong enough to swell up, swallow the high school and the Brick House too. Trees fall all over Peter Pan Court, and Tapiola Court simply disappears beneath the tongue of the river water. Cats are found on roofs, dogs don’t stop barking, and some jokester has vandalized the sign on the edge of town so it says, WELCOME TO COLUMBIA CITY LAKE. The Kirkus house, on a hill, is spared, but there is a fear that its feet will be swept from beneath it. The sidewalk a rushing river. What a strange phenomenon. When Jimmy looks out his front window and sees all that moving water he feels as if he too is drifting.

  Just three miles outside of town the clouds thin, the rain slackens, but here in town everything is veiled, drenched. As if Columbia City has finally grabbed a piece of the squirrely heavens and won’t let go. She holds the clouds close to her chest and damn the rains.

  On the fifth straight day of rain, school cancelled, the cabin fever is too much, and Jimmy wades out into the freezing water in enormous yellow boots his pops once bought thinking he might take up clamming. He takes his old basketball and makes his careful way down to the high school. He finds a canoe abandoned, stuck, and choking in a swing set at Tapiola Park. He bails out the water the best he can with his stocking cap. He’s soaked now, shivering. He paddles on the shallow water the rest of the way to school. Surreal to glide over sidewalks and clogged storm drains. The splashing rain hitting the churned-up water is so constant in its roar it becomes an off-brand of silence. If he doesn’t turn and paddles straight ahead, he would be in the Pacific Ocean before long and who knows how many days it would take to find him—catch on to a good current and be a hundred miles out before night—but he does turn in the end.

  When he gets to the gym, the doors to the Brick House stand open. He has his battered, gray basketball with him, almost black with wetness. He paddles in. Each splash of his paddle echoes in this giant cave. The gym is gloomy, dim, also without power. It means there is no security camera to catch his private moment this time. The EXIT sign somehow still shines on.

  He ties the canoe to the bleachers and wades into Coach Kelly’s office. It’s a bathtub and some of his framed pictures, old trophies, and yearbooks are toys. There, still dry on Coach Kelly’s desk, is his medal. 6A Boys Basketball State Champions. He picks it up; it’s cold, and heavier than he thought it would be. On the bus ride home some of the other guys had been kissing their medals, grinning with them, wearing them into pit stop gas stations, waiting to be noticed. He hadn’t wanted his. Told Coach to hold on to it for a while. Now. Here. This is it. Jimmy puts it on. It taps on his chest. He thought it would be different than this. More. He feels claustrophobic and needs to leave the office. Back into the gym glowing red from the EXIT light.

  He gets back into his canoe and the light guides him well enough to get to the spot on the wall he stained. To the exact place he smashed his head. The red and undulating water cast a wobble over everything. He touches the wall with an open palm. He breathes in. It’s still here. His blood. The blood-red bricks of Kamikaze Kirkus. Already the canoe is drifting. A longer reach to touch these bricks. He takes the medal off his neck. Drops it into the water. Then, in the next moment, he tips his old basketball overboard. It rotates so he sees the last name he wrote on it. Blacker, thicker than the rest. Three letters. D-E-X. It drifts slowly away, spinning, the name of his brother dunked; this time it will not come back.

  Soon the rain will stop, soon the town will rebuild, but they will do so proudly. They were founded on the fur trade, built up by canning, and both have left them, but they don’t stumble. They’ve had two fires, and two floods, and still they survive. “Is this it?” they will ask the sky. “This is all you got?” For their town is home to a champion once again—a legend.

  Jimmy Kirkus unties the canoe and paddles back out into Columbia City.

  Rule 26. First Time Is Rarely the Charm

  Monday, December 17, 2007

  JIMMY KIRKUS, SIXTEEN YEARS OLD—TWO HOURS UNTIL THE WALL.

  When
Jimmy finally left the house, cold air biting back on each breath, it was into what seemed like an impossibly big and crowded place. It was the first snow of the season. A white blanket spread over everything. All the cars just lumps in the snow. The Youngs River a thin, black ribbon tying the white day—down or together, no one could be sure. Snow wasn’t common in Columbia City, and neither was Jimmy Kirkus anymore.

  Jimmy wouldn’t have been able to say how bad off he was. He was like a smudged, unclear word without the sentence written around it. He didn’t know that spending almost a year in seclusion wasn’t normal. It’d been bleak so long there wasn’t another way. He was too young to know that no one is spared sadness or tragedy in this life and that going on, always going on, was expected. Our kid had basically spent a year—a year!—inside that house. Always in the same spot on the couch, trying to say as little as possible and mostly succeeding. Going over every detail of his last day with Dex and his mom. Looking for loopholes, hoping that through some technicality, it would be called back.

  • • •

  Snow brought people out in droves. The kids rode flattened cardboard boxes down rough hills to spill out at the bottom in jumbled messes of limbs and bruises. They wore blue jeans sprayed stiff with rain repellant. They called it good enough. Till next year at least. And then when the next year came, it would be the same story. Just spray down the blue jeans, it’ll work fine. And it never did. Snow always soaked through. That’s so small town.

  As Jimmy walked, the kids sledding, the couples making snowmen, the people walking their dogs, all stopped and stared at him.

  Look, poor Jimmy Kirkus leaving the house finally.

  They say he lives in the attic and won’t talk to anyone.

  Look! He’s gotten so big.

  Well, it’s been a whole year . . .

  In his every step, there was a scary amount of physical power right beneath the surface. Made people nervous just to see it. Like handing a loaded gun to a little kid, they were afraid some part of him might go off on accident. Take a head with it.

  • • •

  When he got to the door of the gym, he stopped and froze, hand midway toward the push bar. He had a brief, but thoroughly terrifying vision of something quick and violent, sandy and cold. A sand toad? He would’ve turned around right then and gone back home—what did it matter?—and there would never have been a legend of Kamikaze Kirkus, if it weren’t for Mr. Berg taking out the trash. The door bust open from the inside and Jimmy jumped.

  “Well, Jimmy, been a little while, now,” Mr. Berg said with a giddiness poorly hidden in his voice.

  “Been a minute or two.”

  “Well, you grew didn’t you?”

  Our kid Jimmy didn’t answer and so he and Mr. Berg each looked off at the hungry Youngs River, running by the high school, on its way to the Columbia. Anyone else and Jimmy would have left without another word. It was Berg though. Guy who was always on his side.

  “Well Jimmy, let me get the door for you,” Mr. Berg said, instantly vanquishing the universe where Jimmy just went home, and there was no Kamikaze, no ten opponents beat in a row, no infamous YouTube clips.

  “Thanks, Mr. Berg.”

  “No problem.”

  He held the door open and the warm air rushed out. Smells that gave Jimmy goose bumps. Rubber and sweat, Gatorade and dust. A little popcorn, maybe? From the last game of the last season?

  He was late to practice and when he stepped into the gym, the noise stopped. Everything hung from where it was about to leap. Words clung to kids’ lips, balls stopped bouncing and stuck to hands, Coach Kelly’s whistle hung crooked in his teeth.

  Then—movement.

  “Well, hey, all right Jimmy!” Coach Kelly yelled overloud.

  And the words dropped again, “Give me a pass, bro.” And the ball bounced, thud, thud. The whistle blew, tweet, tweet.

  “OK, boys, OK,” Coach Kelly yelled awkwardly. Spit laced around his whistle. “We’ll go one more.”

  Jimmy took off his sweatshirt and boots. Sat on his gray ball and laced up a pair of Dex’s old sneakers, the only ones in the house still big enough to fit him. He walked out on the court with shy steps. He’d grown a ton and it wasn’t over, either. Our kid was bigger than Freight Train. A legitimate NBA-sized player.

  “Jesus, Jimmy,” Brian Johnston said. “Grew like a madman.” And the others crowded around the big kid who they once had known as a tiny thing, scared to take a hit.

  “Grow much, Jimbo?”

  “You ate the old Jimmy, you monster!”

  “Sasquatch is real!”

  “You could change the lightbulbs in this place without a ladder.” The team looked up at the high ceiling of the Brick House and laughed, even Jimmy a little.

  “OK, stop flirting, ladies, let’s go,” Coach Kelly said happily. He patted Jimmy’s arm. “You are huge! You look just like—well, never mind.”

  They played, but Jimmy was hesitant. Hands unsure. Feet slower than his thoughts. Worse than before, really. It was masked somewhat by his new size—kids were simply afraid to run into a guy big as he’d become—but it was still there. Jimmy was spooked about getting hit. Anytime contact might become involved, he held back, turned away, passed. He was the biggest on the court, but he still felt the smallest, the weakest. He wanted to scuttle away and hide. And this, just like before, infected everything else in his game: passing, shooting, even knowing where to be. The other team won, 11-6.

  Afterward, Coach Kelly pulled Jimmy aside. “Look,” he told the kid, blinking his watery eyes. “Remember what I told you? Your body can take a lot of punishment and keep ticking. No reason to play scared. You’re body’s built for this stuff. The running and the banging, the falling and the, the skidding . . . all of it really. The other kids should be scared of you! You’re so goddamn big now! You could run headlong into a brick wall and it wouldn’t do a thing. Your body’s built for as fast as you can go on your own feet. Trust me, I teach health class.” Coach folded his arms.

  “I’ll try, Coach.” And in Jimmy’s head, the process had already begun. Maybe not the actual idea, but the series of cranks and levers, pulleys and switches, that would eventually create The Idea that would create Kamikaze were moving.

  In the locker room the other kids asked Jimmy how he’d been. They gamely didn’t bring up the fact that they hadn’t seen him—hardly anyone but that stoner Pedro had seen him—in almost a year. They didn’t talk about the mediocre season they’d had after Dex died and Jimmy left the team. They certainly didn’t say anything about Dex and Mrs. Mori getting in that car crash with that doctor from Portland—a fact that was still vibrating the gossip webs of Columbia City: AFFAIR! CHEATING! VIOLENCE! DEATH! They kidded him about his size and how they bet he had an easy time with his pops in charge of his home school. Easy As and all that. Talked about which poor freshmen kids got bushed and the seniors told him about the colleges they’d applied to.

  Jimmy listened but said little as his mind worked. They were all being so nice. He couldn’t really understand it. Then it came to him. He was a mess. They felt sorry for him. He was fragile. They wanted to try and protect him because he seemed like the sort that needed protection. They knew it just as he did: he was still Jimmy Soft.

  He wouldn’t care except for the power his failure gave them. Besides the team there was a whole town, a whole state, who had opinions on the fall from grace of the Kirkus house. If Jimmy couldn’t do something to change their minds, then their opinions carried weight, no matter how falsely.

  He undressed and showered slowly. The other kids left one by one until he was alone. He dried himself off in front of the mirror. He had avoided looking at himself during his time of solitude, and it surprised him now, what he saw. It was like looking at a movie poster of an action hero and then you realize that’s your face. It’s your goddamn face on the poster. Where’d th
e shoulders and muscles come from? And yet, it was still him. He found the scar where David Berg had thrown a rock at him the year before. Above his right eye. The scar was raised. He’d healed from that.

  Coach Kelly came in, whistling softly, swinging the keys on his finger. Jimmy could see in his gait that he had places to go, people to see, and gossip to spread: Jimmy Kirkus is back, bigger than life itself. But, get this: soft as ever.

  “Get outta here, Jimmy,” Coach shouted playfully. “Practice is over.”

  “I’m going, Coach.”

  “Come on then, hurry it up.”

  Jimmy glanced at the door that led to the parking lot, and then over to the door that went back into the gym. “Go ahead, Coach, I’ll be done in a minute.”

  Coach looked at his watch. “What you trying to stay around for?”

  Jimmy sighed, as though he’d been caught. “Just thought a few more shots is all. I want to get in a couple more. You know. Feels good to be back.”

  Coach Kelly closed his eyes and rubbed his temples. Wheels clicking in there, Jimmy could tell. Guy was a glory hound, that was first of all. If Jimmy could get him thinking he was going to get good again, then Coach would do anything for him. “Fine, fine. Just make sure you close the door all the way when you leave.” Coach Kelly opened the door to the parking lot. Cold air rushed in. He turned back. “And Jimmy, I’ll see you tomorrow at practice.”

  “Sure thing, Coach, you got it.”

  “Close it all the way behind you, Jimmy, I mean it. I don’t want any trouble leading back to me, now.” He winked at the kid.

  “No problem, Coach. No trouble.”

  So Coach Kelly left and Jimmy turned around.

  The Wall was waiting.

  Later. Time