Summer Ball

by Mike Lupica

He looked at Danny, this crazed expression in his eyes and said, “This is so on, little man.” Then: “Get up.”

  Danny did, not knowing what else to do under the circumstances.

  He had no chance against this guy. He never should have gotten him madder than he already was, but he couldn’t run away. Next to him he could hear Zach still choking for air, but he was afraid now to take his eyes off Lamar.

  Who took a step now, like that quick first step he had in ball, drew back his bloody hand the way tennis players did when they were getting ready to hit a backhand.

  Danny froze. Just stood there frozen and closed his eyes, waiting to get backhanded right across the court.

  Only the blow never came.

  “Get off me!”

  When Danny opened his eyes, there was Rasheed Hill behind Lamar, one arm around his waist, the other one with a pretty good choke hold around Lamar’s neck.

  “Get off me,” he said again, weaker this time, because now he was the one who was having trouble getting enough air.

  “Never cared for him much,” Rasheed said to Danny. “Or his game.”

  “’Sheed?” Lamar said in what voice he had.

  “What?”

  Lamar acted like he wanted to get loose, but Danny could see his heart wasn’t really in it, not with the grip Rasheed had on his neck.

  Lamar said, “You’re takin’ his side?”

  “Yeah,” Rasheed said, “I guess I am.”

  19

  LAMAR HAD GONE INTO JEFF LEBOW’S OFFICE FIRST WHILE DANNY and Zach and Rasheed waited outside. When he was finished, Jeff walked him out, to make sure there were no further incidents. It didn’t stop Lamar from walking past them and saying “this ain’t over” under his breath.

  Now the three of them were in folding chairs set up across from Jeff’s desk.

  Principal’s office, summer-camp version.

  “Before any of you guys say anything,” Jeff said, “you might as well know Lamar’s side of the story. Basically, he says that Zach started it by whipping the ball at him, Danny blindsided him with what he called a block below the waist, then Rasheed jumped him from behind before those two counselors broke it up. There you have it.”

  Zach started to jump out of his chair, but Danny stuck out his arm, turning himself into a seat belt.

  “Let me do the talking,” he said to Zach.

  To Jeff: “You’re joking, right?”

  “Do I look like I’m joking?”

  “Mr. LeBow,” Danny said, “that is, like, a total screaming Liar, Liar–like lie.”

  Zach couldn’t restrain himself any longer, even if he did manage to stay in his chair. “He took my favorite ball away from me, one I brought from home, broke the needle in it on purpose—”

  “He says it was an accident,” Jeff said.

  “—then he punched me in the stomach,” Zach said, face red. “That’s when Danny charged him.”

  “Listen, I know that Lamar can be a pain in the butt sometimes,” Jeff said. “But he’s the one with the bruised hand, and he’s the one who was in the choke hold when my guys came by.”

  Now Rasheed spoke. “One he had coming to him.”

  “Three of you, one of him,” Jeff LeBow said. “Just doing the math makes you guys look bad.”

  “Mr. LeBow,” Danny said. “Do you think Zach or I would go looking for a fight with somebody Lamar’s size?”

  “Happens like this all the time in games,” Rasheed said. “Guy hits you with a cheap shot, only the ref doesn’t see that one. All he sees is when you go back at him.”

  “Then they make the only call they can,” Jeff said.

  Rasheed stood up now, pointed casually at Danny. “What he said happened, did. Do what you gotta do. I already did.”

  Then he walked out of the office.

  The regular season at Right Way lasted fourteen games. There were eight teams in their league, so you played the other seven twice. The play-offs started the middle of the last week, which is when other college coaches and prep coaches from around the country showed up to scout.

  Danny, Zach and Rasheed were suspended for two games each. In a short season like this, they all knew it was a lot.

  Lamar got nothing. In the end, it was their word against his. Rasheed didn’t help matters by saying if he wasn’t worried about breaking his hand, he wouldn’t have just grabbed Lamar when he wound up to hit Danny, he would have dropped him.

  In addition to getting the two games, Danny, Zach and Rasheed got two days of helping clean out the bathrooms in the bunkhouses while the afternoon games were going on.

  “I don’t even like going into those bathrooms when I have to,” Zach said.

  “It could’ve been worse,” Danny said. “They could’ve kicked us out.”

  “Nothing’s worse than cleaning toilets,” Zach said. “Nothing.”

  It was the next morning before breakfast; they’d just been told their punishment in Jeff LeBow’s office. He said they could participate in the morning clinics but weren’t allowed to practice with their teams in the afternoon.

  “That’s when we’ll be polishing toilets ’stead of our games,” Rasheed said.

  “I’m doing the showers,” Zach said.

  He went off to breakfast. Rasheed said he wasn’t hungry, he was going to shoot around a little before clinics started. Danny asked if he wanted company, sure Rasheed would say no.

  But to his surprise, Rasheed said, “Come along, if you want.” Then he said he wanted to use the bad court by the parking lots. That way nobody would bother them.

  Danny smiled, told him there was no such thing as a bad court as long as the rims had nets.

  “Maybe in Middletown,” Rasheed said. “Try coming to Baltimore sometime. Might change your mind.”

  The two of them cut around the main building, grabbed a ball somebody had left lying in the grass. Danny and the kid at camp he thought hated his guts the most.

  When they got to the bad court they played some H-O-R-S-E, then a game of Around the World, then 21. When they got tired of games, they did something else Danny thought they’d never do.

  Talked.

  Rasheed said that most people never got past the way he looked, the hair and the tats. That’s what he called them. Tats. Said that even though he was a kid, people looked at him and thought he was just like Allen Iverson. Or maybe some gangsta rapper who could play himself some ball.

  “Do the tattoos hurt as much as guys say?” Danny said. “When you get them, I mean?”

  Rasheed said you get used to it. He said his mom finally said he could get a few, but the deal was, he had to get As in school. Rasheed said he thought that was a fair trade. Danny pointed to one on his upper right arm that said “Artis” and asked who that was.

  “My dad. He died when I was eight.”

  “Oh,” Danny said, not knowing what else to say.

  “He got shot.”

  Now Danny really didn’t know what to say. He was afraid that if he asked how, he might find out something about Rasheed’s dad he didn’t want to know. Or be asking Rasheed to tell something he really didn’t want to tell.

  “Wasn’t what you think,” Rasheed said, as if he’d seen something on Danny’s face. “He was in the wrong place at the wrong time, is all. Coming home from work one night when some guys from a couple blocks up decided to rob a liquor store and started shooting.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Danny said, picturing it like some scene from a movie.

  Rasheed said, “My mom says that’s the big cause of death where we live, being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  They sat on a rock above the court, Rasheed telling Danny that basketball was going to be a way out of the neighborhood for him and his mom.

  “Do people still call it the ’hood?” Danny said.

  Rasheed almost smiled. “Only saltines from the suburbs.”

  “Saltines?”

  “Little white guys from Middletown, USA.”

&nb
sp; “Hey,” Danny said, “I didn’t call it the ’hood, I was just sayin’.”

  Rasheed said he’d had chances to move, like to the school Lamar went off to, but that his mom had a good job working at a bakery, and she wanted him to go to Dunbar High, where his big brother had gone.

  “That’s where Sam Cassell went,” Danny said.

  “You know that?”

  “Even saltines know stuff,” Danny said.

  Rasheed Hill turned and gave Danny some fist to bump.

  “Your mom sounds cool,” Danny said, thinking this was something else they had in common besides ball, cool moms.

  “She’s the one first told me that coming from a single-parent home wasn’t some kind of death sentence,” Rasheed said.

  Danny wanted to say he’d been in a single-parent home for a long time when his dad was away but knew that he’d sound plain old stupid if he tried to compare his situation, his life, to Rasheed’s. So he just fell back on the same thing he always did. “You want to shoot some more?”

  “I’m good just chilling.” Rasheed shook his head. “You believe we got two games and Lamar got nothin’?”

  “You know,” Danny said, “the first night I met you guys, I thought you and him were tight.”

  “That’s what he wanted people to think, that me and him are boys. But we never were, even back in Baltimore. He just got with me that night walking back from dinner. I shouldn’t have let him diss you down like that.”

  Now he really smiled. It caught Danny off balance, how happy it made him look.

  “But I was still mad at you because you flopped,” he said.

  “Didn’t flop,” Danny said.

  “You say.”

  “Because I didn’t.”

  Rasheed put his thumbs together, stuck up his index fingers. The universal sign for “whatever.”

  “Now who’s acting like a saltine?” Danny said. “But this isn’t a whatever. If I say I didn’t flop, I didn’t.” He stood up, fired up all of a sudden. “We gotta be clear on this if we’re gonna be friends. If it’s about basketball and I say something, you have to believe me. I got position, he made the call, I took the hit. If the ref had called it the other way, I would’ve had to accept it. Okay?”

  Rasheed gave him that sleepy look and then said, “Okay.”

  They bumped fists again.

  “Maybe,” Rasheed said, “we’re more alike than anybody’d ever think.”

  In the distance, they could hear the sound of Jeff LeBow talking into his bullhorn. At this time of the morning, it usually meant he was telling guys coming out of breakfast they had five minutes to get to their first clinic.

  Danny got up, grabbed the ball from where it sat at Rasheed’s feet, went out onto the bad court, bounced the ball between his legs, reached behind his back and caught it, bounced it through again without looking down.

  Rasheed motioned for the ball. He spun it on his right index finger, rolled it down his arm, bent over so it rolled on his shoulders behind his head. The ball seemed to defy gravity as it went up his left arm until Rasheed was spinning it on the index finger of his left hand.

  Danny felt like he was at the Globetrotters.

  Finally Rasheed flipped the ball into the air, headed it into the air like a soccer player, watched along with Danny as it hit the backboard just right and went through the net, like he’d been practicing this shot his whole life.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Rasheed said. “We’re in enough trouble, we don’t want to be late for clinics.”

  “I still owe you one for Lamar,” Danny said as they cut back across the parking lot.

  “Just play good when you get the chance,” he said. “No way Lamar Parrish is gonna win the championship of this place.”

  “I don’t play enough to make a difference.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, you must know something I don’t.”

  “Not about basketball I don’t,” Rasheed said. He stopped and gave Danny the kind of shove guys gave each other sometimes. A good shove. “It comes to ball, you’re just like me.”

  This time Danny knew what to say.

  “Thank you.”

  “We’re boys now,” Rasheed said, and something about the way he said it let Danny know the conversation was over.

  They walked across one parking lot, then another, Danny dribbling the ball for a while, then handing it to Rasheed, letting him dribble it, back and forth that way until they were back in the middle of the morning action at Right Way.

  Him and Rasheed.

  Boys now.

  20

  THE CELTICS LOST BOTH GAMES THEY PLAYED WHILE RASHEED AND Danny were in the penalty box, which is how Rasheed described the bathrooms they had to clean.

  The two losses did nothing to improve their coach’s already crabby disposition. So even when they returned to practice, Coach Powers was still fixed on what had happened with Lamar that night and how it had cost the whole team.

  How Danny had cost the whole team.

  Coach Powers: “Because Mr. Walker here dragged Rasheed into his little drama, we have now lost two games and fallen to the bottom of our division and are on our way to having a bad seeding when the play-offs start.”

  Rasheed stepped out of the line, saying, “But, Coach, I thought I explained to you—”

  Danny got in front of him before he could say anything else.

  He wasn’t going to let Rasheed fight his fight every day.

  “It’s all my fault, definitely,” Danny said. “You’re right, if I hadn’t interfered in the first place, Rasheed wouldn’t have had to.”

  “You should have thought of that two days ago,” Coach Powers said. “But there’s no point beating a dead horse.”

  When they got on the court, Tarik whispered to Danny, “Usually the man don’t stop beatin’ the horse till it’s already at the danged glue factory.”

  Their game later that afternoon was on one of the outside courts, against the Nets. Rasheed dominated from start to finish, as if all the ball he’d kept inside of him for the last two days just exploded out of him. And Tarik had his best game by far, twelve points and twelve rebounds.

  Danny played his usual one quarter, down to the second. But on this day he might as well have not played at all, because he was afraid to make any kind of mistake and get his coach any madder at him than he already was. He didn’t take a single shot or make a single pass that anybody would have remembered. Was basically just out there, especially in the second half, when the Celtics were running off as much clock as possible by way of protecting the big lead they’d piled up in the first half.

  On this day, he was back to being Mr. Spare Part.

  It was after the game, when they were sitting on the grass while Coach Powers wore them out telling them what he’d liked in the game and what he hadn’t, that Rasheed informed them all that he thought he might have tweaked his hamstring and might not be able to play tomorrow.

  Coach Powers said for him to go ice it—it would probably feel a lot better in the morning.

  Rasheed said he wasn’t so sure and made a face as he stood up. Danny tried to remember when he might have hurt himself. But all he’d seen, all day long, was another game when Rasheed seemed to be playing at a different speed than everybody else, in a different league, even though the Nets had come into the game with the second-best record in the division.

  “Don’t want to take any chances, is all,” he said to Coach Powers. “I try to force it tomorrow and make it worse, I could end up missing the play-offs.”

  Coach Powers said they sure wouldn’t want that to happen, then reminded him about the ice. By now everybody on the team knew that in Ed Powers’s world, ice could cure everything except chicken pox.

  Rasheed left the court with Danny, Tarik and Will. Like the four of them had been hanging all along. Being friends with somebody can seem like the hardest thing going, Danny thought, until it feels like the easiest thing in the world.


  “When did your leg start acting up on you, dog?” Tarik said.

  “Didn’t.”

  “But you said—”

  “Know what I said,” Rasheed said. “It’s just not exactly the same as what is.”

  “I’m confused,” Will said.

  Tarik grinned. “Tell me about it.”

  “I mean about Rasheed,” Will said. To Rasheed he said, “Are you hurt or not?”

  “I felt a little something pull when I lifted Lamar up off the ground,” he said. “That much is the truth. But it’s not so bad that I can’t play.”

  “But you told Coach you’re not playing,” Tarik said.

  “I’m not,” Rasheed said, then nodded at Danny. “He is.”

  “You’re not taking a day off because of me,” Danny said. “Uh-uh. No way.”

  “Way,” Rasheed said. “I’m not just doing it for you. I’m doing it for the team.”

  “Okay,” Will said, “now I really don’t get it.”

  “We’re never gonna be as good as we’re supposed to be if Walker doesn’t play more,” he said. “You’d think that man would have got past himself and figured that out by now. But he hasn’t. So now I’m gonna help him out a little.”

  Tarik said, “The way you’d help some real old person cross the street. Along the lines of that.”

  “Yeah,” Rasheed said. “Along the lines of that.”

  Danny was on his way to the game the next day when he saw Lamar Parrish talking to Tess. She’d said she was going to just show up one day and surprise them, take a few pictures. Danny had only thought it was a good idea because it meant he got to see her again before she left.

  Now here she was.

  With Lamar.

  Surprise! Danny thought.

  There was nobody else around. It was just the two of them, in the middle of the great lawn at Right Way, where Jeff had greeted everybody the first day of camp.

  There was a big old tree outside Jeff’s office, and Danny stepped back to let it hide him, trying to decide whether to go over there or not, find out for himself what was going on.

  He had managed to stay out of Lamar’s way since the fight. Actually, he and Zach and Rasheed had been ordered to steer clear of Lamar until the end of camp. But Danny didn’t need to be told that by Mr. LeBow or anybody else. He knew that if something else happened he’d only get blamed all over again. Or get kicked out of here. And even though that was something he had wanted to happen a few days ago, when he’d tried to weasel his way home, things had changed.