by Melissa King
Lots of Hispanic people work at the chicken jobs. Some Springdale natives like to make little comments about how many Mexicans ride in a car or live in a house, you know, coming-out-the-windows-type stuff. The way they say it makes it sound like God’s country is teeming with immigrants, nothing to worry about as individuals, but all together a swarm taking over things, one chicken-plucking job at a time.
It makes me so sad to think about the people in those plants all day, trying to keep everything new and hopeful while they’re swimming in gore and wearing hair nets, doing jobs nobody wants to do and being resented for it. So I like Harvey and Bernice, even with their “glorify God and look at my statue” gig, which would normally give me a big pain. I like them because they had some Spanish painted on the front door of that place, and that’s important in a town like Springdale.
I still wasn’t strictly ecstatic on life. There was some junk in my trunk, as they say, but it helped to be playing, to walk up and assert myself, to move and forget things.
I was at Jones one day, playing with a bunch of white dudes. We’d been there for a while, and even though we were still divided into teams, we were really just messing around, most of us tired and getting ready to think about leaving. I was probably the most tired of all, having just come back from my hiatus and everything.
When a group of Hispanic guys walked up, called next, and asked what the score of our game was—all entirely proper protocol—one of the guys in our group perked up and started grinning and cocking his head to the side like a confused dog. He looked around at those of us on the court and started asking what the score was ’cause he didn’t know what the score was, did anybody know what the score was.
Now, when a group calls next, they’ve got next, and that’s all there is to it, unless it’s just ridiculous, like a bunch of second-graders trying to play against teenagers or something. But these were just regular guys, and there was nothing ridiculous about it. They had next.
People often act sheepish or confused right before they do something mean. It’s a common tactic I’ve noticed. But this ringleader dude, he was acting a little too sheepish, like he wanted the Hispanic guys to know he was screwing with them, just to see what they thought they could do about it. He was inviting his fellow whites to laugh, too, with all that winkety wink wink.
Nobody really joined in with him, but nobody was calling bullshit either, so I said, “It’s eight to ten. Y’all’re up.”
That’s what I said, but I didn’t know what the score was or what we were playing to.
“And we’re playing to fifteen.”
I knew better than to look at Ringleader. I knew he’d be a little pissed at me for answering the Hispanic dude’s question like that, and I hadn’t been away from a certain kind of southern boy for so long that I didn’t know exactly how he’d be looking at me, still grinning, but with something new and mean and vivid dancing in his eyes. I was afraid I’d lose my nerve if I looked over at him and he looked back at me. I was afraid I’d add something meek and disastrous to what I’d said, something like “I think.”
I tried not to look at anyone at all, but for just a second I locked eyes with the guy who’d called next. His barely perceptible nod felt like an acknowledgment, but who knows; maybe I was just another Caucasian looking for a thank-you. What I do know is, the guy who’d called next stood on the sidelines keeping score, loudly, as we finished playing our bogus game. He held his ground, watching, making sure his team got its turn, and I was proud of him, or as proud as anyone can be of a complete stranger.
After being ready to quit, everyone on the court was hustling again, trying to get rebounds, swearing at missed shots. I played hard, too, my legs burning with fatigue, and I steered clear of Ringleader, imagining how wild his elbows might get. The good ol’ boy glee bouncing in his eyes felt a little slippery, like it could easily morph into something else, and I didn’t need any “oh gosh did I get you in the nose I hope it’s not broken” crap.
Playing with Ringleader wasn’t what I’d call high-quality basketball. You have to wonder if some people ever have anything really good, even for a day, even for a minute.
Something happened one time years ago when I was playing Pictionary with a group of people, all of us white. The game was close, and nearly over, and a guy was drawing something that could’ve been interpreted as a big head of hair.
The rules are, you have to guess what the picture is before time runs out, and the person drawing can’t say anything.
“Afro!” somebody yelled.
The guy drawing shook his head no and kept trying. The sand was running through the miniature hourglass, and everyone was hollering out answers, laughing and hectic. A group of people playing a board game on a weekend night: nothing but pure wholesome entertainment, right?
The guy who guessed Afro must have thought he was hot on the trail of the right answer, because he kept shouting out guesses, and we all laughed louder with every shout.
“Black!”
“African American!”
“Bill Cosby!”
Then he did it.
“Nigger!”
I was pretty sure the guy didn’t think that would be a legitimate answer on a board game. He just said it to see if everybody would keep laughing when they heard it.
Some people are always fishing to find out where you stand on important issues of the day, see whether or not you’re like they are. They think about stuff like that all the time, even when it has nothing to do with the situation, but since they can’t very well introduce themselves by saying, “I hate niggers, don’t you?” they just throw out some bait and see who bites.
None of the Pictionary players did, and the host didn’t hesitate before saying, “We don’t use that word in our house.” The room got quiet, the sand finished running to the bottom of the miniature hourglass, and nobody guessed the right answer, which was porcupine.
The guy scrambled to recover before managing to assume a studied air, like he was thinking of something real deep and was gonna try and explain it so as we’d all understand.
“When I say nigger, I don’t mean black. I know white people who are niggers, too.”
It wasn’t the first time I’d heard this bit of redneck intellectualism. It’s a basic part of the toolbox for someone who wants to keep saying nigger all the time but still thinks of himself as a nice person.
I grew up around that kind of thing, in a town where there were no immigrants and the only black people who ever came to our house were some guys who worked for my dad at the furniture-making factory in the next town. Dad was a line manager there, with blacks working under him on the line and whites working above him.
The line guys came over to play basketball in our driveway sometimes, and it tended to raise eyebrows. The neighbors didn’t say anything—it wasn’t like the Klan lived next door—but you could see their cars slowing down a little as they drove by the unusual sight.
My dad liked to see the cars slowing down. It made him proud, like he was taking a stand against all the rednecks in the world, including certain of the white bosses, aka the “big shots,” wearing their short-sleeved shirts and ties, talking about paperwork in a way that made the word sound as complicated and mysterious as quantum physics, shaking hands with each other in church, and telling what they considered to be hilarious stories about the last animal they shot, how some raccoon’s body acted without a head.
My dad had a job with paperwork, but he didn’t go to church and he didn’t hunt. Most of the time, he was just solitary.
The line guys drove the ten miles out to our house together, and my brother and I went out on the driveway to shoot around with them as they and Dad figured out teams. If they needed one, they picked up Andy, and as they took the ball out for the first play, I went to the edge of the garage, put the tailgate down on the El Camino, and sat down to watch. It was assumed that I didn’t get in when the line guys were there.
The line guys were good pl
ayers, and so was my dad. He was around thirty-five at the time, and he was barely five-foot-nine, but he was fast and creative and bold enough to drive the lane and get his share of inside shots.
He still had some of the old high school point guard in him, apparently impervious to the three packs of Salem Menthols he smoked every day. He was a passer, ready to hit you upside the head if you weren’t looking, and he played hard defense.
My dad didn’t smile very often. He didn’t like for anyone to see his teeth, because he had an overbite. I had the same teeth, and I remember one time before I got braces, I was laughing and some older kid stuck his top teeth out to show me how I looked like a dorky beaver type of person. That certainly caused an abrupt end to my good time, and I could see how my dad wanted to avoid it, but out there with the line guys he seemed to forget about his teeth and the rednecks and the big shots and his factory job and his loneliness and whatever all else he thought about. Out there on the driveway, he was laughing and hollering like players do, because the game was always good when the line guys came around.
Sometimes my dad would tell Andy and me about the time he set his high school record for scoring, about how, when he was playing, no matter how loud the gym got, he couldn’t hear the crowd. It was still one of the highlights of his life, one of the places where he found peace, I think.
He was happy to play with the line guys, who had grown up playing, happy with the way they told funny stories instead of corny jokes, the way they didn’t spit tobacco or make you nervous talking about did you know where you were going to spend eternity.
The line guys were some of the few people who made my dad forget to hold his face in check, and I wish I could say I grew up in a house where nobody ever said nigger. Life is hardly ever simple, is it?
My brother Andy and I still play together sometimes. He knows his way around a pickup game, and it’s nice, showing up at a court with him. We usually get on the same side, but sometimes if there are a lot of players and everyone shoots for teams, we end up on opposite sides. We never want to guard each other, though. It’s awkward, trying to keep him from scoring, and neither of us seems to try very hard when we’re matched up.
Andy, his friend Brett, and I had been shooting at Jones for a while when I ducked my head around the vinyl curtain separating the two courts and saw these three young guys. They looked a little alike, all rawboned, with angular, fatless bodies, pimply faces, and greasy, peeled-looking hair. They were just standing there, so I asked them if they wanted to play.
One of the guys said, “You sure?” all cocky like.
“Yeah, I’m sure,” I said.
“Are you really sure?” he asked me, grinning, like he thought it was pretty funny, me taking them on.
I said, “Yeah, come on,” giving him less of a smile than he gave me.
We started playing, and the guys were good: experienced and fast and strong. There’s no way the game should’ve been close, but somehow it was, and we ended up winning. The rawboned guys didn’t like it, getting beat by thirty-year-olds, one of them a woman.
“It’s that crappy ball,” the cocky one said. “We don’t wanna play with no fake NBA crap. Where’s that other ball at?”
The other ball was actually the bad one, an old leather junker that never should’ve been taken outside, but it was Andy’s ball they were calling crappy. It was a disrespect move. And a lame excuse.
Andy laughed casually and said, “Yeah, well, let’s switch ’em out.” Then he and I walked over to the water fountain, cool as salad. But once we were out of earshot, I looked around to make sure those guys weren’t coming and admitted to Andy that I thought we were pretty lucky to win that one game.
Andy’s face was red, and his shirt was soaked with sweat. He’s pretty fit, but the bottom of his T-shirt hung away from his shorts a little, giving away the distinctive over-thirty proportion you see on the court. He rose up from the water fountain and said, “Gotta go!” like he was going to head for the exit and leave me there.
Our asses got good and kicked in the second game. It was a regular testosterone fest, although Andy and Brett’s version was a little tamer than the rawbones’. I wanted to win, too, trying to be intense in my own way, with everyone around me dripping machismo. I kept my game face on, knowing Andy and Brett would expect me to. I didn’t smile too much or put my hands on my knees to rest between plays or anything.
After they beat us, the young guys looked relaxed and relieved, like their world made sense again.
“Yeah, well, wait till they’re thirty,” Andy said, laughing, as we packed up to go.
After that game, most every time I went around Jones, I’d see some of those guys who beat us. One of them worked at the desk, and when I’d get a ball, he’d yell out to another worker, “Don’t give her no ball, she ain’t got no game!” just like that, the same exact way, every time. I’d always laugh for him, or sometimes I’d mumble something about him putting his money where his mouth was. It seemed like the right thing to do.
But I didn’t say much, because I really don’t talk trash very well, like I said. Some people find it easier to live in the moment, enter the milieu of social discourse without even thinking about it. They wouldn’t call it “enter the milieu of social discourse” either; they’d just say what they were thinking and then probably forget about it ten minutes later. Me, I remember what I didn’t say for years.
Andy always knows some guys playing somewhere. I think it’s because men invite each other to golf or play basketball or be on a softball team. I get invited by women to Pampered Chef parties, which are probably fun and everything, but when you go you’re expected to buy something, and I never seem to have an extra twenty-five dollars in my budget for a new baking stone. I already have enough baking stones at my current inventory of zero.
For a while, Andy and I played together at a middle school with a group he knew. One day I got there early, and I’d barely pulled my sweats off when two nine-ish looking girls came running up to me, asking if they could shoot my ball. I said sure and tossed it over to them.
It was clear from the get-go that most of the talking would be done by the pretty one, an exquisite-looking creature with a long, straight, blond ponytail you knew guaranteed her a life of friends and envy. Her sweatshirt was a perfectly faded navy blue, and it hung to just the right length, and it wasn’t too baggy or too tight. A personal stylist could have lived in her bedroom, working fulltime to make her look accidentally perfect every day.
The two girls were about the same size, skinny and bristling with imminent transformation like tadpoles sprouting legs, but their physical similarities ended there. The friend had dark, coarse, unruly hair. Three inches of wrist stuck out awkwardly from the sleeves of her garish pink sweatshirt with a cracking, silk-screened rainbow covering its front. And her face was disfigured, especially around her nose and eyes, where her skin looked like it was stretched too tight. I imagined her born that way, with some “condition” or “syndrome.” In my family, old ladies would have said she was a mongoloid the poor little thing, and the nice kids would have said don’t look at her, she’s retarded, our word for all conditions, even those, like hers, that appeared to be physical only.
The disfigured friend suggested a game of horse while the pretty one bounced around looking like a Basketball Barbie Junior. I said a game of horse sounded fine, and the friend shot the first basket and made it. I shot, and I made it. Then the pretty one hurriedly shot and missed.
“What does that make me?” the pretty one asked, her eyes darting toward the door.
“H,” the friend and I said.
The friend shot again. She made it.
I shot and missed.
“H,” the friend and I said again.
We told the pretty one that now she picked her own shot, and the friend passed her the ball. She caught it and shot an airball from where she was standing.
“H-O,” she said.
The friend and I tried to ex
plain to the pretty one why she didn’t get a letter, but she wasn’t listening. Instead, she was trying to convince her friend to go outside and talk to a boy for her, to find out if he liked her. The friend refused on the grounds that she was afraid the boy would beat her up. Actually, she seemed interested in our game of horse. She really looked at the hoop when she shot; she concentrated on making it. The pretty one asked me if I would go outside with her, and I said oh no, huh-uh, I didn’t mess around with any mean boys.
Of course, I’ve messed around with plenty of mean boys, but I was trying to make them think they didn’t have to.
“Just make me H-O,” the pretty one said, tossing the ball absently in my direction.
As we played horse, I gathered that the pretty one felt like the boy outside had led her on, saying he liked her until she started liking him back. She kept squealing, “I’m so mad!” Then she’d make an exquisite little stomp with her foot, and squeal again.
“Boys don’t like me,” the friend said with a shrug.
I said something about them being nice girls (I almost said pretty and I should’ve said smart) and not to worry about anything. They sort of listened, but I could tell by the way they looked at me that it was clear to them I wouldn’t know anything about it.
Other girls their age were coming around, looking excited to be in the pretty one’s crowd. They were jittery and quick-moving, following instructions.
Andy and some other guys wandered in, and the group of girls disappeared outside. Maybe they were pursuing the boy, with their newfound safety in numbers, but whatever it was they were doing, they looked like they’d accomplished it when they came back. The pretty one marched her group over to the bleacher where Andy and I were sitting, waiting on the next game. She asked Andy if we were going to have the court for a long time, and he politely told her yes, we were.