No Slam Dunk

by Mike Lupica

  Wide open.

  All Dinero needed to do was pass him the ball one more time.

  He didn’t.

  Instead he put his head down, got a step on Paul, pulled up at the free-throw line even though he hadn’t attempted a jumper that Wes remembered the whole fourth quarter, and released his shot with five seconds left.

  He shot it too hard, the ball bouncing off the back rim, falling to the left side of the basket.

  It looked like they were going to overtime.

  To everybody except Wes Davies.

  He hadn’t stopped to watch Dinero’s shot the way everybody else on the court had. He was following the ball and the play all the way, moving toward the basket from the left corner as soon as Dinero released the ball, just the way he had been taught.

  Nobody boxed him out. Nobody slowed him down. It was why, one last time today, it was his ball, not Dinero’s or anybody else’s.

  He didn’t have to wait for anybody to pass it this time.

  Wes went and got it himself.

  He felt the ball come down into his hands as he was going up, putting his soft touch on the putback, the ball hitting perfectly off the backboard and falling softly through the net.

  He heard three things in the gym at Annapolis High, one after another.

  Wes heard the horn sound, meaning the game was over and the Hawks had won.

  He heard the cheer from the section of the stands where the Hawks’ parents, including Wes’s mom, were sitting.

  And then he heard a man’s voice from the other side of the court, the man yelling his head off.

  “Hey! Throw my boy the damn ball!”

  Wes knew without looking who that voice belonged to.

  In that moment, in front of everybody, it was like Lt. Michael Davies had turned into Lonzo Ball’s dad, which meant the worst and loudest basketball dad in the world.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  WES JUST WATCHED IT HAPPEN, unable to do anything to stop it, frozen in place.

  After all the noise at the end of the game, the gym had gotten as quiet as his mom’s library at Annapolis High.

  His dad’s familiar Orioles cap was on his head, just not straight, slightly to the side. He was wearing one of his favorite red flannel shirts, hanging outside his jeans.

  He looked unsteady as he made his way to the court.

  “Boy was hot as a pistol down the stretch!” he yelled. “You don’t make him work to get the damn ball! You just give him the rock and let him win the game!”

  Wes knew he was really talking about—or talking to—Dinero Rey. Wes looked for him, found him standing in front of the Hawks’ bench, eyes big.

  His dad was in the middle of the court by now. For some reason he had a ball cocked on his hip.

  Wes thought that if his dad had been drinking when he’d come to the house last weekend, he had been drinking a lot more before he came to the game today.

  But at the house, only Wes and his mom had seen.

  Now everybody could see.

  And hear.

  “You got to feed the hot hand in this game!”

  He put out his right arm, kept the ball on his hip with his left.

  “Am I right?” he yelled.

  Then Michael Davies saw where Wes was standing and waved at him.

  Wes couldn’t move.

  There was a part of him that wanted to help him, get him out of here. But a much bigger part of him wanted to run the other way.

  Fortunately, his mom had made her way down to the court now, too. At the same moment, Coach Saunders took a couple of tentative steps in the direction of Wes’s dad.

  But Wes, forcing himself to move, beat them both.

  “Dad,” he said in a voice as quiet as his dad’s had been loud, “please stop.”

  He put a hand on his dad’s right arm.

  But Michael Davies yanked it away.

  “What are you talking about?” he said. “I’m your father!”

  “Not like this you’re not,” Christine Davies said. She placed her arm around Wes.

  Wes’s dad lowered his eyes and his voice in the same moment.

  “I was trying to help out my boy,” he said in a voice that you could have scraped off the court in that moment.

  “I think,” Wes’s mom said, “you’ve helped him enough for one day.”

  With that, Wes’s dad turned and started walking toward the double doors that led to the lobby of the gym, and then the parking lot beyond. He banged slightly into one of the doors, somehow hanging on to his ball, as he disappeared.

  He had told everybody that he was trying to help his son.

  But who was going to help him?

  TWENTY-SIX

  FOR SOME REASON, WES LOOKED up at the scoreboard once his dad was gone, even though Wes could still hear his voice, as if it were echoing all around the gym.

  The final score was still up there. The clock read 00:00. But he wanted to turn back that clock somehow, just a couple of seconds. A couple of ticks. He wanted it to be the part of Saturday right before the game was about to end right. When everything still felt right. He wanted to go back to the way he felt when he was blowing past everybody on the baseline to get that offensive rebound, and then when the ball was leaving his fingertips and he knew—he just flat knew—that his shot was going in and that the Hawks were going to win the game.

  He was still staring at the scoreboard when he felt a hand on his shoulder. He knew it wasn’t his mom. Somehow, being his mom, she’d known that he didn’t want her to stay out on the court with him, like she was protecting him somehow. So she had gone back to stand with E’s parents and give him room.

  It was Coach Saunders.

  “You okay?” he said.

  “Not so much.”

  Coach was a big man, bigger than Hassan Jones, six four at least. Wes thought he looked a lot like the actor Denzel Washington, who’d been in one of his all-time favorite old movies, one he’d watched over and over again with his dad, Remember the Titans. He never talked much about his own basketball career, but Wes had looked him up and knew that he’d been a pretty good baller in his day at Loyola, in Baltimore, a tough small forward who could shoot and rebound.

  “You go be with our team now,” Coach said, leaning down so only Wes could hear what he was saying, almost like he was telling Wes a secret. “Time like this is what a team is for.” Coach paused. “But if you want to talk about this later, you call me, hear?”

  “I’m not much of a talker,” Wes said.

  He turned and looked up and saw Coach smile. “Kind of picked up on that by now,” he said to Wes.

  “Nothing much to talk about,” Wes said. “Everybody here saw.”

  “I just want you to know that I’m here for you,” Coach said. “We all are.”

  Wes thanked him. They walked together toward the bench. Wes’s mom was behind the bench, talking to E’s mom and dad, but keeping her eyes on Wes. Josh’s mother had brought the snacks today, cookies and Gatorade and bananas and apples and water bottles and juice bottles. Mrs. Amaro, they all knew, did it up right as their team mom.

  Wes sat down in the middle of the bench, teammates on both sides of him. Them being there with him, as if they were establishing some kind of perimeter, didn’t make what had happened a few minutes ago go away. Nobody could make what had just happened go away, not now and maybe not ever.

  But Wes, the team guy, somehow felt better having his team around him this way, as Josh and Russ and E started to replay the last few minutes of the game, going over it, possession by possession, until they got to the Hawks’ last possession, and how the only one of them who really kept playing until the horn sounded, the way Coach told them to, was Wes.

  He’d been the one to go get the ball when no one else did.

  “Player making a play
, is all that was,” E said, as if he were broadcasting his statement to everybody still left in the gym.

  Even Dinero chimed in. “We went from a low-percentage shot, which happened to be mine, to a high-percentage shot.” He pointed at Wes. “Yours,” Dinero said.

  “Thanks,” Wes said. “But anybody could have done it. Nobody put a body on me. It was like I was chasing down one of my own misses in my driveway.”

  “Anybody could have done it,” DeAndre said. “But you did.”

  “Should have seen the look on Hassan’s face,” E said. “He was, like, where’d that boy with the Porzingis hair come from?”

  They all laughed as Wes self-consciously ran a hand through his hair. He did wear it a little bit like Kristaps Porzingis of the Knicks. They pretty much had the same light hair color and the last time Wes had gotten his hair cut, he’d actually printed a picture of Porzingis to show the barber, telling him that’s the way he wanted it, shaved close on the sides and with what E called a fade in front.

  “Got lucky,” Wes said.

  “Got us a game, is what you did,” Russ Adams said.

  Finally it was time for them to all leave. Wes’s mom was over talking to Coach Saunders, but whatever she was saying to him couldn’t have been too grim, because he was smiling and nodding. E asked Wes if he still wanted to hang out later. Wes said he’d call after he got home.

  Wes went to his bag, took out his shooting shirt, put it back on, started to walk out to where his mom and Coach were standing at midcourt. Where his dad had been.

  As Wes did, he realized that Dinero was walking with him.

  “Hey,” Dinero said.

  “Hey,” Wes said.

  “That was bad,” he said. “With your dad. Even though I know I’m not telling you anything you don’t know.”

  “He’s been like that before,” Wes said. “Just not in public.”

  “Just wanted to say I feel for you. Can’t be easy dealing with that, him going all LaVar Ball on you.”

  “Yeah,” Wes said. He wondered how Lonzo Ball had dealt with his dad when he was growing up.

  “You must be really mad at him,” Dinero said.

  That made Wes pause. “Not really.”

  Dinero stopped. So did Wes. They turned to face each other.

  “You’re not mad at him?” Dinero said. “For real?”

  “I feel bad for him, not mad,” Wes said.

  “After what he just did to you?” Dinero said. “No way.”

  Wes shook his head. “It’s more like something he did to himself because he couldn’t help himself,” Wes said. “He doesn’t want to be the way he is right now. Whatever happened to him in the war, he didn’t want any of that stuff. He probably didn’t want today to happen. But like I said, he just can’t help himself.”

  Dinero blew out some air and said, “Wow, you really mean that, don’t you?”

  “I really mean it,” Wes said.

  “So what are you going to do?” Dinero said.

  “Find him,” Wes said.

  “If you do, what are you going to say to him?” Dinero asked.

  “Maybe thank him.”

  Dinero shook his head, as if he might not have heard right.

  “Thank him?” he said to Wes. “For what?”

  “For being here.” He nodded and said, “At least he was here.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “DO YOU THINK HE’S HAD time to walk there?” Wes’s mom asked.

  Wes said that there had been more than enough time since the game ended.

  Then Wes said, “And he wouldn’t have tried to drive, right?”

  “Even in an impaired state,” Christine Davies said, “I don’t believe your father would ever put someone else in harm’s way. I may have trouble recognizing who your father is these days, but I still know him better than anyone.”

  She gave a quick sidelong glance at Wes when they came to a stop sign.

  “Why do you think he’s there?” she asked.

  “Because he had that old ball with him,” Wes said.

  “And you think he’ll be willing to talk to you?”

  “Maybe not,” Wes said. “But he won’t be able to hide the way he did when I went to his apartment.”

  He told his mom what he’d told Dinero: as badly as his dad had behaved today, at least he had been there.

  They were on their way to a small park a couple of blocks away from the rec center, with a basketball court—a half-court, really—that hardly anybody used anymore for pickup games, because the outdoor courts at the rec center were so good. His dad used to take Wes there after dinner occasionally, saying that they had to get out of the driveway and let his game breathe. The surface of the court needed work, and Michael Davies kept replacing the nets himself when they were torn or simply gone. Hardly anybody ever played there, especially in the early evening.

  Wes’s dad called it their secret basketball place.

  There were no lights, even though they could see the lights from the court at the rec center and hear games going on over there. But they’d work on things until it got too dark, and sometimes even after that. Just the two of them.

  When his dad had gotten back from Afghanistan this time, he’d go over there alone sometimes, not asking Wes if he wanted to go with him, as if now he’d needed a secret basketball place all his own.

  Wes asked his mom to stop the car at the entrance to the park, where the kids’ playground was. He said he probably wouldn’t be long. She said that if his dad was there to take as much time as he needed.

  He walked across the playground and heard the bounce of a basketball, a pause, and then heard the sound of the ball banging off the rim.

  He saw his dad, alone out there.

  He looked the same as he had at the game, except that he’d stuffed the Orioles cap into the back pocket of his jeans, which seemed to be hanging on him even more than they had when he’d come to the house, as if he’d lost more weight in the past week. He didn’t seem unsteady, at least not here, the way he had at the gym. He just looked slow as he chased down a missed shot, so much slower than Wes remembered him being when they used to come here together.

  Now they were together here again.

  But not anything like the way they used to be.

  Wes still didn’t announce himself. He just watched as his dad dribbled toward the faded free-throw line, measured his shot, squared himself up, and put up a set shot that was too short, and barely clipped the front of the rim on the way down. There was, Wes noticed, no net.

  As he walked after the ball—he’d always make Wes run after missed shots—Wes said, “You call that a follow-through?”

  His dad didn’t turn right away. Wes saw his shoulders slump, as if he’d been caught, like a kid doing something wrong. He reached down and picked up the ball and was already shaking his head, even that move slow, as he did finally turn in Wes’s direction.

  “You shouldn’t have followed me here,” Michael Davies said.

  “I didn’t actually follow you, Dad,” Wes said. “I sort of figured it out.”

  “Same thing.”

  “I wanted to talk,” Wes said.

  “You might want to talk about it,” his dad said, “but I don’t.”

  “Okay,” Wes said. “Maybe I’ll just shoot around with you a little bit.”

  He hadn’t changed out of his game sneakers. But he didn’t care. He wasn’t even sure what he thought was going to happen now.

  He took a couple of steps out onto the court.

  His dad shook his head, more vigorously than before.

  “You need to go,” he said.

  Then: “Where’s your mother?”

  “Waiting in the car.”

  “She knew I wouldn’t want to talk to her, either,” his dad said.

&
nbsp; “You always said she was the smartest one of all of us,” Wes said.

  “At least that hasn’t changed, even if everything else has,” he said.

  They stood there looking at each other. The ball was back on his dad’s hip, the way it had been at Annapolis High. More than anything in that moment, Wes was hoping his dad would pass him the ball.

  But he didn’t.

  It was like the weirdest playground stare-down that Wes Davies had ever been in, like they were each waiting for the other to make the first move.

  Finally his dad said, “I’m sorry.”

  Wes realized how much he didn’t want to hear those words. He wanted his dad to be tough. He wanted his old dad back. “You don’t have to apologize,” Wes said.

  “Yeah,” his dad said. “Yeah, I do. Sometimes you gotta man up when you let people down.”

  Suddenly he took the ball off his hip and got it into both hands and raised it over his head and then slammed it down in front of him before managing to catch it.

  “I’m sorry for everything,” Michael Davies said.

  He made no move to come closer. Neither did Wes.

  Wes said, “You were there the other day, weren’t you? At your apartment when I went over there?”

  His dad nodded.

  “Why didn’t you come to the door?” Wes said.

  “I was embarrassed,” he said. “Your mom was right to call me out like she did and I knew it. I was ashamed and didn’t want to see anybody.”

  “I’m not just anybody,” Wes said. And just like that, no warning, he felt himself wanting to cry. But he wasn’t going to let it happen.

  His dad said, “You were such a good player today.”

  Wes couldn’t tell whether he was saying it with pride in his voice or hurt. Or both.

  And he couldn’t hold in the question he’d been wanting to ask anymore.

  “Dad,” he said, “please tell me what happened to you. What made you like this?”

  Another quick shake of the head from him.

  “I gotta go,” he said.

  Wes was the one shouting now.

  “Why won’t you just tell us?” he said. “Why won’t you let us help you? Please let us help you.”