by Scott Ostler
I dished back to James, and Spider hustled back to him, so he passed back to me. Keep-away. I flipped it back to James and Spider didn’t even try to get back to James, who banked in a ten-footer. Spider was breathing hard.
The Cougars hit a shot, and we tried out another piece of our new attack, a fast break after the other team scores. That’s harder, because you have to take the ball out of bounds, which gives the other team time to get back on defense.
But Trooper said it could be done. Often the opposing players will relax for an instant after their team scores, and that’s when we strike. Even if they don’t relax, we’re putting pressure on them by speeding up the pace of the game, not allowing them to rest on defense, wearing them down.
James was the key. On a made basket by the other team, his job was to grab the ball quick, get out of bounds, spin his chair, and throw the in-bounds pass. Everyone has to be moving, fast.
James caught the ball as it dropped from the net, before it hit the floor. He pushed out of bounds, spun, and hit me, fifteen feet away on the right side. I heard Hayley whistle so I knew she was ahead of her defender. I turned and threw a simple pass to her, and she cruised in for a layup.
The Cougars’ coach called time and slammed her clipboard onto the bench.
We were back in the game. Our Flow was flowing!
The Cougars were tough, though. They had finished third at State the previous season. They were slower and more deliberate than us, but a little older and more experienced. And they had three players who could shoot from the outside. Spider swished a couple of three-pointers.
After three quarters we trailed, 36–28.
“What did we stop doing?” Trooper asked, looking around our huddle.
Silence.
Then I heard myself say, “Moving.”
Trooper nodded. “Our offense will work only if all five Rats are moving, nobody resting. If you’re not sure what to do, if a play breaks down, just move. Move to an open space. Set a pick. If it doesn’t work, move on.”
I blew out a breath. I was gassed. My arms felt like lead from pushing my chair so hard, and that made it harder to pass the ball. I had to put extra effort into every pass or it would fall short. I tried to keep a smile on my face, because with my old coach, if you even looked like you were tired, he would take you out for a rest. But Trooper subbed me out, anyway.
Hayley could see that the girl guarding her was tired, so she rolled back and forth along the baseline, like a windshield wiper. The defender knew Hayley could shoot, so she had to stay with her. DJ was setting great picks, and the Cougars were getting tired of banging chairs with him. Two of his picks sprang James for open shots. Mia was a defensive demon, with a steal and a deflection.
With three minutes left in the fourth quarter, we were still four points down. Trooper looked at me and nodded. “Back in, Carlos,” he said, “right after this time-out.”
In the huddle Trooper said, “Heads up. Look fresh. This is where we put the hammer down.”
DJ’s eyes got wide. “How can we put the hammer down when we’re all exhausted?”
Before Trooper could answer, James said, “Hey, look.”
He nodded toward the Cougars’ bench. Their players were slumped over in their chairs, like they’d just pushed through a marathon. They were more gassed than we were. That gave me a jolt of energy. Our Flow was wearing them down.
“It’s all about digging,” Trooper said, looking from face to face. “Who’s tired?”
“They are,” James said. Then he spun around and sprinted onto the court.
We set up our offense and started passing. Seven passes! Two of them were mine, and I heard Trooper snapping his fingers. Finally, James hit Hayley cutting along the baseline for a layup. Hayley’s man muttered a bad word. Down by two.
The Cougars missed a short shot; DJ snatched the rebound and threw an outlet pass to James. He barely touched the ball before passing it to Mia, streaking for a fast-break layup. Tie score.
“Come on, guys,” the Cougars’ coach yelled.
I looked at James and he nodded.
One minute left. We dug in on defense. With twenty-five seconds on the clock, Spider cut around a screen and shot from the free-throw line. Swish.
I cringed as the ball dropped through the net. But my pregame jitters were long gone. I was pumped up, like on a roller coaster when you get over the fear and start enjoying the thrill.
“Let’s go, Carlos,” Mia yelled, in-bounding the ball to me.
Time running out. I passed to James, Mia set a screen for him, and he had an open shot from ten feet. It hit the front rim, bounced up, bounced up again… then fell off to the side as the buzzer sounded.
I slumped in disappointment. Then I heard loud clapping and looked up. It was Trooper, clapping and nodding. “Keep your heads up,” he said as we rolled to the bench.
The Cougars rolled off the court cheering and hollering.
“We didn’t get that one win we need to qualify for State today,” Trooper said, “but I think we found something. I don’t know if you guys can see it yet, but we can do this. I hope you are all starting to feel something here. It’s joy. Basketball is joy. It’s there, but we have to find it, on every play. This was a great start. I believe in you, Rats.”
I looked up into the stands. Augie gave me a thumbs-up. Rosie gave a little fist pump.
WHAT WOULD GANDHI DO?
OUR CARAVAN STOPPED AT A KOREAN BARBECUE PLACE in Fresno for our postgame meal before hitting the road home. Kids at one table, adults at another.
Trooper wanted us to feel good, but it hurt to lose after being so close. We took turns taking the blame.
“I blew that layup late in the game,” said Jellybean, who looked miserable in a way I had never seen him.
“Phil the Thrill would have made that last shot,” James said, his eyes glued to the tabletop.
Hayley drew a cartoon of herself shooting, the ball clanging off the rim.
I shook my head and said, “I should have done a better job stopping Spider.”
Finally, Mia said, “Come on, guys. We all made mistakes, that’s basketball. But we worked hard, and we almost beat a really good team. In their gym.”
“But our ticket to State was right in our hands,” DJ said.
“Let’s forget this game,” James said. “We have two more chances to get that win we need for State. Or four more, if we get back into the Rat Palace.”
“You know what?” Jellybean said. “It was cool to see the Cougars get all panicky. I thought their coach was going to have a heart attack.”
“Yeah,” Hot Rod said. “Isn’t it funny how Trooper never loses his cool like that?”
“It’s almost like he’s an adult or something,” Jellybean said, with a grin.
“We gotta get back into the Palace,” James said, lowering his voice. “If our two home games get wiped out and we have to practice in that parking lot, we’re in trouble.”
“Nothing we can do about it,” Jellybean said, his palms up.
Long silence, then Hot Rod said, “I wonder what Gandhi would do.”
“Gandhi?” James said. “That guy from India?”
“I’m reading about him at school,” Hot Rod said. “He was a great philosopher and civil rights leader. What’s cool about him is that everybody talks about problems, but Gandhi actually did something about ’em. He changed the world.”
Everyone looked at Hot Rod, like, Where is this going?
Hot Rod waved his fork. “All I’m saying is that instead of just worrying and talking about getting back into the Rat Palace, maybe we should do something.”
“What else can we do except wait for the city to fix the place?” Jellybean said.
“I’m still thinking,” Hot Rod said.
“I can hear the wheels spinning,” Jellybean said.
“Gandhi led boycotts and marches, and went on long fasts,” Hot Rod said, thinking out loud.
I flipped my menu onto
the table and said, “There’s nothing for us to boycott. And if I fasted, it would hurt my uncle’s feelings. He’s a great cook.”
“We’d make a pretty wimpy protest march,” Mia said.
“Hey,” Hot Rod said excitedly, “when Gandhi got kicked off a train once because of the color of his skin, he fought back by writing letters to newspapers. He started a whole campaign.”
“You think we should write a letter to the Bay City Breeze?” Mia asked.
Hot Rod’s eyes lit up. “If the Breeze did a story about our team and the Palace, maybe that would put pressure on the mayor or whoever to fix our gym sooner.”
“Why would the Breeze write about us?” James said. “We’re just a kids’ basketball team.”
“In wheelchairs,” I said.
“Dude,” said DJ, making a face. “Are you saying we should play the sympathy card?”
Mia jumped in. “Trooper always tells us to use whatever tools we have.”
“If we just write them a letter,” I said, “they might ignore it. Maybe it would be better to go to the Breeze in person.”
Everyone was nodding, maybe waiting for me to take the lead. So I blurted out, “It would be hard for the whole team to go to the Breeze, but maybe a couple of us? I have to go downtown tomorrow, to the library for a school report. The Breeze office is near the library.”
“I’ll go with you,” Mia said quickly. “The two of us should be able to handle it, right?”
Hot Rod held up his glass of root beer and said, “Here’s to Carlos and Mia, and to Gandhi!”
On the ride home, Hayley and Jellybean fell asleep in about five minutes, but Mia and I, sitting in the far back, were wide awake, and Trooper was quiet. In the car, he’d pretty much left the conversation up to us kids.
“I like the way Trooper doesn’t feel like he has to coach us every second,” Mia said quietly, and I nodded.
We were quiet for a minute, then I said, “Who is Phil the Thrill? I keep hearing that name.”
“Oh, Phil Butler, he was our big star last year. He was basically the reason we made it to State, even though we bombed out once we got there. He aged up this year; he’s playing on the fourteen-to-sixteen team.”
“Man, you guys lost Phil the Thrill and gained, uh, me. That doesn’t seem like a very good trade.”
Mia looked a little embarrassed. “Actually, I think we did okay on that trade. Phil could really shoot, but he didn’t pass much, and it’s more fun to play with someone who passes the ball. I don’t hear any of our teammates complaining about that.”
We were quiet for a while, then Mia said, “Hey, Carlos, I heard your aunt call you mijo. What does that mean?”
“Rosie and Augie are from Mexico,” I explained. “Mijo is affectionate, like ‘little brother’ or ‘little dude.’ There’s also carnalito, which is the same, but more kidding around. Or they call me Carlito, Little Carlos, like my parents did.”
“That’s so awesome,” Mia said. “It’s like poetry.… Hey, could I see a picture of your parents sometime?”
She looked a little embarrassed, like maybe she was being too nosy or insensitive.
I called up to Trooper, “Coach, is it okay if I use my phone for a second to show Mia a photo?”
Trooper nodded. I thumbed through my photos to one of my mom and dad at a park, taken not long after they first met. They’re sitting on a picnic blanket; my dad’s arm is around my mom’s shoulders. I handed my phone to Mia.
She looked at the picture for a long time, then handed my phone back.
“Thanks, Carlito.”
FLASHBACKS
SOME NIGHTS I WAS AFRAID TO FALL ASLEEP, AFRAID I’d start dreaming and get pulled back into the hospital in Montana. Whenever I had that dream, I would wake up and be afraid to go back to sleep and return to that room, Aunt Rosie sleeping in the cot next to my bed, both of us still so sad, and so scared of what was ahead.
It had all started with a great vacation—Mom, Dad, and me.
Dad liked to do things without a lot of planning. He was a musician who moved from England to America on a whim, and he always said being spontaneous made life more exciting. My mom would joke that he was just too spacey to plan anything. One day he came home and said, “Let’s go on vacation. We’ll leave tomorrow. Two weeks—we’ll tour the Wild West, like Lewis and Clark.”
“I’ll be Lewis,” Mom said. “But you can call me Meriwether.”
Mom was a civics teacher and soccer coach, and the practical one in the family. But she was also like me—she loved how Dad made everything an adventure. We packed up the car and left that night, too excited to wait for the morning.
It was such a cool trip. We had no plans; we just drove until we saw something that looked interesting or fun. Or until we found a cheap motel with a pool. The last memory I have of the trip is of us driving along a two-lane highway, looking for a cowboy museum my dad had read about. We were singing along with a song on the radio. Sometimes, I close my eyes and I can still hear my mom’s voice.
Then it all goes dark.
Two weeks later, I woke up in the hospital with no parents and a damaged spine, barely hanging on to life.
Over time, I learned what had happened. A reckless driver crossed the center line and hit us head-on. Mom and Dad were gone instantly. I was pulled out of the wreckage by a guy who stopped to help. I’m so lucky he was a paramedic, otherwise I never would have made it.
I learned later that I stopped breathing four times before the medevac helicopter arrived, but the paramedic kept restarting my heart, while holding my stomach closed to keep my intestines from spilling out of a big cut.
The police found my mom’s cell phone and started calling, and eventually they reached Rosie. She and Augie rushed to the airport without even packing a bag.
This is what Augie told me months later: “We phoned the hospital as we were boarding the plane. They said you were in critical condition. The nurse was very kind but she told us not to hurry, because you weren’t going to make it. Rosie told the nurse to go put the phone next to your ear. The nurse said, ‘You don’t understand, ma’am. Your nephew is in a coma, he can’t hear anything.’
“Your aunt can be very stubborn, Carlito. She told the nurse to do it anyway. Then she said, ‘Carlos, this is your tía Rosie. Augie and I are on our way. We will be with you in three hours and you’d better be waiting for us, because we need you.’”
Augie was pretty busy with a handkerchief as he told me the story.
“Rosie didn’t realize she was yelling, and I didn’t either, until we noticed that all the other passengers on the plane were staring at us. Suddenly there were two hundred people on that plane saying prayers for a kid they didn’t know. Prayers for Carlito. Several of those people gave us their names and addresses and invited us to stay with them in Montana. The pilot phoned ahead and the police met us on the airport runway and drove us to the hospital.”
For two weeks, Augie and Rosie took turns sitting next to my bed or sleeping on a cot in the corner of the room. I was in a coma, more dead than alive, but they read to me and talked to me, and sometimes they sang to me. They brought a radio and played broadcasts of basketball games.
One day Augie was reading to me and I opened my eyes. The first thing I saw was my uncle in tears, saying, “Good morning, Carlito.”
I was in intensive care for two more weeks, and in the hospital for three months after that. Augie went back to Bay City to his job, and Rosie took a leave of absence from her job as an art teacher to stay with me.
Almost every day, somebody who had been on their flight came to the hospital with a home-cooked meal for us. To this day, Rosie and Augie have about fifty Facebook friends in Montana keeping track of the three of us. Rosie says someday we’ll go back there and have a big reunion.
The day after I woke up, Rosie told me about Mom and Dad. I was in such deep shock that when the doctor told me I wouldn’t regain the use of my legs, it’s like I didn’t even ca
re. He told me, “This doesn’t mean you can’t lead a full, wonderful life, Carlos.”
I barely heard him. All I could think about was my mom and dad, and how wrong it was that I hadn’t gone with them to wherever they went. Nothing made sense.
A few days later I asked my aunt, “Rosie, what’s going to happen now?”
She said, “One day soon, Carlos, we are going to leave this hospital together. Then you, Augie, and I are going to start a new life together. You have us, and we have you, and thank God for that.”
When the doctor told me I would be starting physical therapy, that should have been good news, because it meant that I was getting better. But nothing mattered.
My roommate was Mitch, who had already been in physical therapy for a couple of weeks. He’d been in a swimming-pool accident and lost the use of his legs. He was a really funny guy, and he even made me laugh. We got to be good friends, playing video games and watching movies together, and just talking. He helped me realize I wasn’t the only kid in the world with a tough situation.
The day before my first physical therapy session, Mitch laughed and said, “Carlos, you’re about to meet Penny, the Princess of Pain. Don’t let her smile fool you, brother.”
When I woke up the next morning, Penny was beside my bed, smiling. She was in a wheelchair—Mitch told me he thought she worked from a chair so she could show me how to do stuff in my own wheelchair.
I told her, “Uh, I’m really tired today. Can we start this tomorrow?”
“Doctor’s orders,” Penny said cheerfully. “You don’t want me to get fired, do you?”
I turned my head and stared at the wall.