Summer Ball

by Mike Lupica

  Danny walked over, picked the ball up, dribbled out to the spot where he’d tried to shoot over Kareem. Like the hoop gods—his dad was always talking about the hoop gods, as though they watched every single game—were giving him a do-over. He dribbled in and shot the ball higher this time—nobody in his face, no long arms up in the air—and watched the ball drop through the basket.

  Nothing but stinking net.

  Then he jogged to catch up with Will and Tarik, wondering if those few minutes with Rasheed, before the air ball, was as good as it was going to get for him at the Right Way basketball camp.

  It was Gampel’s night to use the phone, which meant it was Danny’s first chance to talk to his dad about everything that had—and hadn’t—happened in the last day or so.

  As soon as Richie Walker got on the line, he wanted to know everything about the knee, whether the swelling was on the inside or the outside, if the doctor was sure it was just a sprain and not ligaments, if the doctor was sure there was nothing floating around in there. His dad still considered himself a medical expert, not just on knees, but everything else after all the broken parts he’d had fixed in his life.

  “Dad,” Danny said, “I’m fine.”

  “Well, you’re not fine if they still want to do an MRI,” his dad said. “That doesn’t sound fine to me.”

  Danny was in the phone booth with the door open, because it was a hot, muggy night in Cedarville. Zach was waiting to use the phone next. Danny closed the door now, even if Zach knew most of the story about the fake knee injury. It was more Danny being so embarrassed about what he was going to say next that he didn’t even want himself to hear.

  Like he was telling somebody he was afraid of the dark.

  “When I say fine, Dad, it means I was never really hurt,” he said. “I wanted an excuse to get out of here.”

  Out with it, just like that. He felt bad enough about having lied to the doctor and his mom and maybe himself. He was done with that, for good. He wasn’t going to lie to his dad. Before he’d even considered doing something this lame, he should have thought about what his dad looked like in the hospital after his last accident. He should have remembered how his dad’s basketball life—and nearly his whole life—ended in that first car accident his rookie year.

  He could hear Tarik’s voice inside his head now.

  True that.

  On the other end of the phone line, Richie Walker didn’t say anything at first. It was one of those killer silences parents gave you sometimes, in person or over the phone, when they were trying to make you keep talking.

  Or maybe his dad couldn’t believe what he’d just heard.

  “I’m not sure I heard you right,” Richie Walker said.

  Danny said, “You heard right.”

  Finally, Richie said, “That’s not you.” There was another pause and then he said, “Man, that’s never been you.”

  “Dad,” Danny said, “I know that now. I would have figured it out on my own. But Tess—she’s here—got in my face the other night and made me see how dumb I’d been.” He paused before he said, “Dad, believe me, there’s nothing you could say that would make me feel worse than I already do.”

  “I don’t care how much this coach got to you,” Richie said. “You never fake an injury in sports. Never.” He spit out the last word. “You quit before you do that.”

  “I know that now,” Danny said.

  “Do you?”

  “Dad, I made a mistake, and I’m owning up to it. Isn’t that what you always tell me to do?”

  “You want a trophy for that?”

  There was a lot more Danny wanted to tell his dad, to make him understand, wanted to tell him about Coach Powers saying he should switch sports, that maybe soccer would be better for him. But he was afraid it would come out sounding like one more lame excuse for faking the injury.

  So he kept what had happened at Coach Powers’s cabin to himself, through a silence from his dad that felt longer than eighth grade.

  “You want to come home, come home,” Richie said. “You want to stay, then show this coach he was wrong about you. Other than that, I’ve got nothin’ right now. Talk to you soon.”

  Didn’t say he loved him. Didn’t wait for Danny to say that to him.

  Just hung up.

  Danny stood there, the receiver still to his ear, listening to the dial tone.

  Then he took a deep breath, leaned out and asked Zach if he could make one more quick call. He pumped some change into the phone, called the number at Tess’s uncle’s house. He was going to tell her about the conversation with his dad, but when she came on, telling him in this happy excited voice about a fish she’d caught that afternoon, he decided against it. He would have skipped talking about the game, too, but she asked him about it once she was finished with her fish tale.

  “Aren’t you the one who always says there’s a lot more that goes into a game than the last play?” Tess said.

  “Yeah, but—”

  Tess cut him off. “Forget the ending and think about the good stuff as a beginning.”

  “Okay,” Danny said.

  “Promise?”

  It was a big deal with her, getting him to promise something.

  “I promise,” he said.

  Danny wanted to know when he was going to get to see her again.

  “I have my camera with me,” she said. “Maybe my uncle can call Mr. LeBow and he’ll let me come over to take some pictures.”

  “I’d be good with that,” Danny said.

  Tess said, “Until then, you can keep worrying about the way the game ended or suck it up and treat the good stuff like some kind of start.”

  “Are you trying to sound like my dad?”

  “Your mom, actually,” Tess said.

  But at practice the next day it was as if the good stuff from the day before hadn’t happened, at least as far as Danny was concerned.

  Cole Duncan was back with Rasheed and the first unit, even with a bandage over his eye and a pretty impressive black-and-blue bruise showing around the bandage. Danny was with Will, Tarik, Alex Westphal and another forward, Tony Ryder, who’d missed the Bulls’ game because of what Tarik and Will described as a truly epic night of hurling the night before.

  On their way from practice to their four o’clock game against Lamar Parrish and the Lakers, Will and Tarik were still ragging on Coach Powers for the way he’d talked to them about what had happened against the Bulls.

  “You listen to Dead Head Ed,” Will said, “and Rasheed was going one-on-five when we came back on those suckers.”

  “Next year it’s going to be ’Sheed saving the world on 24 instead of my man Jack Bauer,” Tarik said.

  It turned out to be a great game against the Lakers, even if Danny only played a quarter of it. The Celtics got ahead early because Rasheed couldn’t miss and because their bigs, meaning David Upshaw and Ben Coltrane, were pretty much schooling the Lakers’ bigs. And also because Lamar Parrish seemed to be making only about one of every three shots he took in the first half.

  By halftime the Celtics were ahead by fifteen. Danny was hoping for a blowout, not just because he might get some extra minutes, but because he wanted to see Lamar Parrish suffer a little.

  Or a lot.

  But from the time the second half started, it was Lamar who couldn’t miss. Didn’t matter if Rasheed was on him or Cole. Or both. Didn’t matter when the Celtics went to a zone, first a 3–2, then a box-and-one with Cole chasing. As much as Danny knew Lamar was a bad guy, it was like watching a pro take over a game.

  Like watching the real Kobe.

  With just over a minute left, he finally tied the game with a three-pointer. Danny was in the game now, because Will and Cole had both fouled out. Rasheed got fouled at the other end, made two free throws. Thirty seconds left. Celtics back up by two.

  Wasn’t enough.

  Lamar calmly ran the clock down, drained another three, immediately ran to the other end of the court, holding
the front of his jersey out, yelling “Uh-huh…uh-huh…uh-huh.”

  Only the game wasn’t over.

  One second left.

  As soon as the ball had gone through the net, Danny had turned to the nearest ref, calling one of the two time-outs he knew they had left, just because he always knew stuff like that. Then he ran over to Rasheed and said, “I know you don’t like me, but you gotta listen to me, I’ve got a play that’ll work. But you gotta tell Coach. He’ll never take it from me.”

  As they walked toward their bench, he told him as fast as he could. When they got into the huddle, Rasheed laid out Danny’s play for Coach Powers.

  Coach Powers said, “You can make the pass?”

  “Yeah,” Danny said, “I can.”

  “What if they put somebody on the ball?”

  “They haven’t done that all day.”

  “You can make the pass?” Coach Powers said again.

  “Yes.”

  Hoping he was right.

  He took the ball at half-court. Alex screened Lamar the way he was supposed to. Danny fired the ball quarterback style, not at Lamar but directly at the backboard, as Rasheed came flying at the basket from the opposite side.

  Danny’s pass was right on the money, hitting the board right above the square, like a carom shot in pool, bouncing right into the hands of Rasheed Hill, who caught the ball and laid it in and won the game for the Celtics, 62–61.

  As soon as the refs made the motion that it was a good basket, Lamar rushed the counselor working the clock. His coach and a couple of teammates saw what was happening, that Lamar was really going after the kid, and managed to cut him off. They finally got him calmed down enough to start moving him toward the door.

  Before he was out the door he yelled over at Rasheed about winning the game with some tricked-up play.

  Rasheed shrugged and actually smiled. “Not my play,” he said. He nodded at Danny and said, “His.”

  Danny never showboated. His dad always said it wasn’t in their blood. But he couldn’t help himself, just this once. Now he smiled at Lamar, pulled his jersey out in front of himself, real fast, just once, and walked away.

  “That’s right, midget!” he heard from behind him. “Have your little fun now!”

  “I think he’s taking it well,” Will said.

  Danny had still felt like a spectator for most of the game. It was still Rasheed’s team, the way the Lakers were Lamar’s. The way the Warriors had been his team once. Here he was a role player, one who had come off the bench to help beat Lamar Parrish today. He was the kind of player who was going to get to shine like this once in a while, be expected to blend in the rest of the time.

  He knew that was the way he had to approach things the rest of the way, do his best not to mess up, on or off the court, maybe even get another chance to make a hero play.

  No such luck.

  The very next day he was in Jeff LeBow’s office. In the office and in trouble.

  18

  THE FIGHT STARTED WITH LAMAR TAKING ZACH’S BALL.

  Danny had found Zach shooting by himself on a half-court nobody ever used on the woods side of Gampel. A lot of guys, as usual, were at the counselors’ game, but Zach wasn’t interested in watching the counselors play. If he could catch part of one of Danny’s games, he would, just because it was Danny, because he’d use almost any excuse to hang around with Danny during the day, even though they were bunking together at night.

  The rest of the time Zach Fox just wanted to go play.

  The kid who’d showed up as the unhappiest camper at Right Way was happy as long as he had his ball and enough room to dribble and shoot it.

  He was more interested in playing than he was in eating or sleeping or hanging with kids his own age. Danny still wasn’t sure how much Zach loved camp. But as much as he still liked to complain about being here, he couldn’t hide how much he loved basketball. Clinics, practices, games, it didn’t matter. He was into it now. He had ended up on what sounded like the best team in the eleven-and twelve-year-old division. He liked his coach, an assistant from Northeastern University in Boston, a lot. Since that night when Danny had heard him crying himself to sleep, he had never said another word about leaving.

  Zach was pretty much having the kind of camp Danny had been hoping to have, at least before Coach Powers came into his life.

  On this night, he was working on his outside shot, something he’d turned into his summer job, shooting it correctly now, not launching it the way he had before he got to Right Way, the way Danny used to.

  Danny was helping him, calling out pointers, mostly feeding him the ball, feeling like he owed Zach one for the day when Zach had stood there holding up that broom.

  That’s when Lamar came along.

  Right away, Lamar started calling Zach Frodo, asking if he was practicing for the championship of Middle Earth, ignoring Danny at first, but clearly directing his insults at both of them.

  Tarik would say later that he was surprised Lamar had even seen a Lord of the Rings movie. “Or understood it,” Tarik said.

  Zach tried to ignore Lamar, just kept shooting the ball.

  But Lamar, being Lamar, wouldn’t let up.

  “How come you don’t have those big Frodo feet?” he asked Zach. “Like you was wearin’ Charlie Barkley’s real sneakers, instead of those baby shoes you got on yourself?”

  Now Danny said, “Leave him alone, Lamar.”

  Lamar looked at him. “What are you, his lucky charm? You do look a little like that leprechaun guy on the side of the box.”

  “Seriously, Lamar, you must have something better to do,” Danny said.

  “Listen to the boy beat me with his little tricked-up play. You still feelin’ all puffed out about that?”

  “I don’t get puffed out,” Danny said.

  “I saw you after the game.”

  Danny couldn’t help himself. “I was just trying to be more like you.”

  “You want to be more like me? Grow, little man.”

  “Let it go, Lamar.”

  Zach was still trying to pretend Lamar wasn’t even there. So he took a couple of dribbles, shot the ball.

  Big mistake.

  Lamar went and got the rebound.

  Looked at the ball and saw Zach’s name written on it in Magic Marker.

  “Your own little ball,” Lamar said.

  He bounced the ball a couple of times, then said, “Oh, looky here—it needs air.”

  Zach said it was fine the way it was, it had never needed air from the day he got it and could he have it back?

  “No, midget,” Lamar said. “I can always tell when a ball’s flat, and this one is flat.” Then he walked over to the little storage box that was at all the outdoor courts. Every box had pumps and needles inside, along with a bunch of indoor/outdoor balls.

  “It’s fine, really,” Zach said.

  “Can’t a brother try to help?” Lamar said, a pump in his hands.

  He stuck the needle into Zach’s ball, pumped a couple of times, then smiled at Zach as he broke the needle off, knowing it was going to be stuck inside Zach’s ball for good.

  Every kid in the world knew what that meant.

  The ball was ruined.

  Forever.

  Only then did Lamar Parrish give Zach his ball.

  Zach stepped back and whipped it right at Lamar’s head, the ball either catching Lamar on the side of his head or his shoulder, Danny couldn’t tell for sure from the side. But wherever it hit, it made Lamar real mad, because he grabbed Zach by his shoulders and started shaking him, hard. Zach’s head bounced around like he was a bobblehead doll.

  Then Lamar lifted him up by his T-shirt, so the two of them were eye-to-eye for a moment.

  Danny’d seen enough.

  “Put him down, Lamar,” he said, trying to sound calmer, more in control, than he really was.

  Lamar, still holding Zach in midair even as Zach twisted and kicked his legs around, as if this took no eff
ort on Lamar’s part, laughed and said, “Right.”

  “I mean it,” Danny said.

  “He asked for it,” Lamar said. “You doin’ the same?”

  “Guess so.”

  The last fight he’d gotten into, what he promised his mom and dad was the last fight he’d ever get into, was with a Middletown kid named Teddy (the Moron) Moran, who’d played for the other travel team in town, the Vikings, the team that had cut Danny. But Teddy was more mouth than anything else, more a threat to your ears than any other part of you.

  Lamar Parrish was different. A whole lot different. A lot bigger than Teddy, a lot stronger.

  A lot meaner.

  “You want to pick on somebody, go back to picking on me,” Danny said, not getting any closer. He didn’t want it to look like he was trying to get up in Lamar’s face, but he wasn’t going anywhere, either. He felt his fists clench at his sides and hoped he wouldn’t have to use them.

  Because if he did, Lamar was going to use his.

  Lamar put Zach down but kept a hand on him, the way you did on defense when you wanted to watch the ball and keep contact with the man you were guarding at the same time.

  Zach said to Danny, “I can fight my own battles.”

  It made Lamar laugh. “Right,” he said. “If you stand on the other Hobbit’s shoulders, maybe.” And then, in a move so fast Danny almost missed it, Lamar took his big right hand, the one he had on Zach, and flicked it into his stomach like a jab.

  Zach Fox doubled over and sat down, gasping for breath, tears in his eyes.

  Lamar looked down at him and said, “What are you, a girl?”

  Without thinking, Danny charged Lamar then, lowering his shoulder and grabbing him around the waist, surprising him enough that they both went down.

  Lamar rolled back up on his knees first, staring down at the dirt all over tonight’s Kobe jersey, the purple road version, as though he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Then he looked down at the blood on the back of his right hand where he must have landed.