For the next four days she immersed herself in these books.
(Two of them came to the library on Tuesday afternoon, the others the following day.)
She most appreciated the literary style of John Wooden, whose work, for some strange reason, reminded her of Eudora Welty. Don Meyer was not bad, and came across with a touch of Stephen Vincent Benet. Kevin Sivils was John Cheever, Joseph Fontanella had in him a bit of Spinoza, Jerry Krauss was Tacitus, and for most of the Bobby Knight book, she just marked through the dirty words.
She also borrowed from Jackson Bennett, the films he’d taken of all the girls’ games, including last year’s loss against Hattiesburg.
She also, being a good southern woman, realized that preparations for battle demanded knowledge of the arts of war: so she checked out a book on The Battle of Gettysburg, whispering, “This time we’re going to win.”
At practice on Monday and Tuesday, she did nothing but sit high in the stands and watch, paying particular attention to the five on five scrimmage that took up the final thirty minutes of each session.
And on Wednesday afternoon, at precisely three thirty, she was ready.
She called the players into a tight circle and spoke to them:
“All right, ladies. We lost to Donaldsonville for the following reasons: we did not recognize that they had switched from the matchup zone they employed during the first three and a half minutes to an alternating diamond and two and box in one, with number thirty two shadowing Alyssha on alternate possessions and number fifty four fronting Sonia when the ball was on the left side of the court or when Amanda threatened to go baseline. Furthermore, we consistently misread their offensive configurations and so were unable to penetrate the screens they set for number twenty three, who, because of her shot-making ability and tendency to go left handed with alternate dribbles, and her sagacity in choice of shots behind multiple picks––burned our collective little butts.”
The players stared at her, open mouthed.
She was to continue for fifteen minutes.
Then it was time to get to work.
Having done nothing for the rest of Wednesday’s practice and all of Thursday’s practice but five on five scrimmage, they felt prepared for their home game against Logansport.
The last game before Hattiesburg.
Nina showed up in her best beige suit, and two-inch high heels.
The best women coaches, she’d noticed by watching Jackson’s films, always wore high heels.
The Bay St. Lucy gym was aglow, as always, with the snack bar doing land office business, Rotary Club and Masons passing out programs and directing people to their seats, band blaring, cheerleaders hurling themselves into the air, and Jackson Bennett alternately screaming encouragement and glowering at the world.
Nina noticed none of these things.
She simply stared at the Logansport players as they ran through pre-game drills.
Number thirteen is only good with her right hand; she cannot dribble left. Number twenty four has a hitch in her shot. Number forty does not miss, from any range—keep the ball out of her hands. Number four will be their go-to girl inside—front her with Amanda, keep Sonia darting at her like a sparrow, don’t let her turn and go to the basket.
Keep number six off the baseline.
School song.
Star Spangled Banner.
Blare of the horn; two minutes until tip off.
“OK, huddle up!”
Nina was kneeling in the middle of the circle of players now, drawing frantically on the gym floor with a piece of chalk she had brought from one of the school classrooms.
“We’re going to open up man to man, Sonia you take six, Alyssha thirteen, Amanda twenty four, Hayley number forty AND DENY HER THE BALL. SHE DOESN’T MISS, HAYLEY. WE’RE DEPENDING ON YOU. DON’T LET THE BALL GET INTO HER HANDS!”
“I won’t, Coach.”
“Good. Now we’re not going to go plodding around with this team like we did at Donaldsonville. We have more speed and quickness than they do; so it’s what we worked on the last two days, a three quarter court zone press every time we score, if they beat that press to half court then get back, but relapse into an alternate half court zone press and man-to-man press depending on their offensive configuration and who’s handling the ball out front. Now look, look here…”
She was drawing madly now, oblivious to the crowd noise behind her or the fact that Logansport’s green-clad players had already taken the court, and were standing, hands on hips, awaiting the jump ball.
“They’re too slow to guard us man to man so they’ll go zone, but Sonia you’ve got to see this when you first bring the ball down court, even front zone we attack with odd front offense, and vice versa, if they’re odd front, we go even.”
“Now every time we switch zones or offensive attacks, I’m going to scream: GAME CHANGE! Ya’ll got it?”
“WE GOT IT!”
“THEN GET ON OUT THERE AND WHIP THEIR TAILS!”
“YEEAAAHHH!”
And the game began.
Nina was able to sit quietly on the bench for perhaps a minute and a half. Then she sprang to her feet and followed the basketball up and down the court, ignoring the people sitting at the scorer’s table, and fixated only on the tangle of green-clad and white-clad bodies hurtling against each other, weaving through each other, and jumping over each other.
“Front her, Sonya! No, closer! Atta girl! Move in behind, Alyssha! NO! NO! Dammit ref, she’s all over her get her off her back. MOVE AMANDA! That’s right. That’s….OH COME ON REF. ARE YOU BLIND? Now…now get into the press now DOUBLE TEAM DOUBLE TEAM DOUBLE TEAM…
“GAME CHANGE!”
“THAT’S RIGHT TAKE IT FROM HER TAKE IT FROM HER TAKE IT FROM HER! YES YES YES YES …TWO! TWO! TWO! TWO!”
On you Mare ners On you Mare ners
FAT FAT FAT FAT FAAAAAT!
“Get back get back double down double down on her KEEPPRESSINGKEEPPRESSING…
“GAME CHANGE!”
“WATCH THAT BASELINE DO NOT LET HER TAKE YOU DEEP HAYLEY STAY IN FRONT OF HER!”
“MOVE HER DOWN MOVE HER DOWN WATCH THE PICK WATCH THE PICK OK OK NICE PASS NOW SCREEN AND ROLL SCREEN AND ROLL SHOT SHOT SHOT! TWO TWO TWO ATTAGIRL ATTAGIRL!
Cheer cheer for St. Luuucy Hiiiigh!
Bring on the whiskey bring on the rye!
Ever loyal to those mare ners
Fighting for victory
Baddadadadadda…
“NO DON’T LET HER SLIP BACK DOOR ON YOU BABY FRONT HER POST HER UP POST HER…OH!”
“GAME CHANGE! GAME CHANGE!”
“YES! YES, WAY TO PICK IT UP YOU MARINERS! NOW THREE QUARTER WATCH CENTER COURT WATCH THE SNOWBIRD WATCH THE SNOWBIRD THAT’S GOOD ALYSSHA HAWK HER HAWK HER PRESS PRESS PRESS PRESS…”
“GAME CHANGE!”
Foul.
“WHAT? THAT’S RIDICULOUS! THE OFFENSE INITIATED CONTACT REF!”
Swish.
Swish.
“THAT’S OK THAT’S OK STAY AGGRESSIVE STAY AGGRESSIVE! MAN DEFENSE NOW SLIP INTO NUMBER TWO ATTACK NUMBER TWO WAY TO MOVE SONIA TAKE IT TAKE IT TAKE IT YES YES YES NOW…”
“GAME CHANGE!”
“GREAT STEAL SHE’S OPEN DOWN COURT HIT HER HIT HER NICE PASS LAYUP YES!”
“GAME CHANGE”
“NOW DOUBLE DOWN POST HER UP POST HER UP POST HER…”
“Coach?”
“What is it, ref?”
“You’ve got to stay in the bench area.”
“Ok ok but, keep number twenty four off Amanda’s back, will you?”
“Just stay in the bench area.”
“Yeah, all right but look at the game some time, will you?”
“This is a warning, Coach. I don’t want to have to warn you again.”
“Right. I got it.”
And then ball thrown in by Logansport.
More switching.
More pressing.
“GAME CHANGE! GAME CHANGE!”
The game began to move from a canter to a sprint, and the players hurled themselves up and down the court at a frenetic pace.
WATERMELON WATERMELON WATER
MELON RIND!
LOOK AT THE SCOREBOARD AND SEE WHO’S BEHIND!
Four minutes to go in the half. Mariners thirty six-Logansport eighteen.
It was then that it happened.
“STAY BEHIND HER DON’T LET HER DOUBLE DOWN ON YOU LIKE THAT WATCH THE PICK AND ROLL DON’T SET THAT STATIONARY SCREEN GET THROUGH IT GET THROUGH IT GET…OH! OH BEAUTIFUL PICK NOW…”
“GAME CHANGE! GAME CHANGE!”
Tweeeeeet.
Whistle.
“Coach!”
“What is it, ref?”
“I’ve warned you about staying in the bench area.”
“Okay I heard you.”
“No, this is it! I’m tired of having to stop the game like this.”
“Then don’t stop the game, dammit! Let ’em play. But will you get number thirty-four off my nose guard’s back?”
“That’s it, Coach!”
“What?”
The black and white zebra’d referee bent back, then javelined his arm over his head and bellowed:
“YOU’RE GONE!”
“WHAT?”
The crowd bellowed back:
They did not say “what?”
Fourteen men, several of them coaches, ran as fast as they could up into the stands where they threw themselves on Jackson Bennett, who did not notice them.
‘YOU…….! ARE YOU…….!”
The only person in Bay St. Lucy who could have restrained him physically or matched profanity with him was Penelope Royale, and she was not there.
In a short time, another fourteen men had surrounded him, and somehow they kept him from committing what, given his rage and lack of self control, would probably have been considered manslaughter in the second degree, or “Man Two.”
Nina, of course, took no notice of anything that was happening in the stands.
“Are you serious?”
“You’re gone!”
“I haven’t done anything!”
“You’ve got to leave the court area! Now!”
“You can’t throw me out of this game! I’ve got a right to coach this team!”
“Leave! Leave the court area! Right now!”
And then the state patrolmen came.
Amazing.
Every time Nina looked up these days there seemed to be state patrolmen around.
Were these the same two who’d led Meg from the building?
Oh, it probably didn’t matter. One state patrolman, another state patrolman…
…pretty much all the same thing, when one thought about it.
“Coach, you need to come with us.”
“But but but but…”
“Now.”
“Oh, come on!”
The players were circled around, staring open-mouthed.
She looked at them and said:
“Game change.”
Then she left the court.
She spent the second half in the dressing room, being consoled by this parent or that who came down to tell her she was doing a wonderful job and that they had no right to treat her this way.
Finally, with perhaps a minute left in the game, Jackson Bennett appeared.
It was of course the women’s dressing room, but nobody was going to throw Jackson Bennett out of it.
He stood massively in the doorway.
Then he took two steps toward her and said:
“I’ve never seen anything like that in my life.”
She tried to answer but could think of nothing to say.
He continued:
“I’m so proud of you. And Frank would have been, too.”
Then they embraced.
Then he told her the final score: Bay St. Lucy sixty eight, Logansport forty-one.
Then they embraced again.
CHAPTER 16: MOCKMACE!
“...how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life.”
––William Faulkner, Light in August
“The displacement of water is equal to the something of something.”
––William Faulkner
The following Friday, Bay St. Lucy High School took the MOCK MACE.
This did not happen quite as expected, though.
The tests—in English, math, social studies, and Spanish—were to be administered at precisely ten AM, taken with Number 2 pencils, and finished by 11:50.
Except that at 9:35 AM, a fight broke out.
This was not one of the after school fights that took place ever so often, and that Nina had broken up on her first day back.
This was a fight in school.
“Ms. Bannister?”
“Yes,” Nina answered, taking her nose out of the English literature MOCKMACE she was reading over and hoping that the students would remember that Huckleberry Finn was not written by Nathanial Hawthorne. “What is it?”
“There’s something going on down the hall!”
“What? What’s going on?”
“I don’t know; there’s just a lot of yelling!”
She got to her feet, left the office, took off down the hall, and glanced around for state troopers.
None in sight.
Well, that was something, anyway.
The shouting was coming from Max Lirpa’s room.
Room 102.
Chairs, she could hear, were being thrown around.
“NO! NO! DAMMIT, NO!”
She approached the door, which was closed, and put her hand on the handle.
Several people who worked in the office had clustered behind her.
She opened the door.
All of the students were standing, but two in particular had faced off in the middle of the room; the others had formed a kind of semi-circle around them.
The two who’d been shouting, and who now stood glaring at each other, were football players.
She’d spent so much time recently with the women’s basketball team that she’d forgotten what male football players looked like.
They were very big.
On one side of an imaginary ‘x’ that one could visualize in the floor’s middle, stood LaMarcus Johnson, an ‘athletic’ defensive tackle. (Athletic, in the school’s sensitivity and ethnical propriety code, meant that he was an African American.) Facing him, red faced, was linebacker Thomas Swinson, who was a ‘disciplined’ defender. (Disciplined meant that he was white.)
LaMarcus, at six feet five, was somewhat the bigger of the two; but Thomas was no stripling, and the potential clash between them promised broken furniture at the least, and perhaps a shattered wall of windows.
“All he had to do,” LaMarcus bellowed, “was get out of the damned road!”
“He couldn’t!”
“Why the hell couldn’t he?”
Nina took two steps forward into the room. The small entourage behind her followed.
“The way he was brought up, man!”
“What are you talking about? What does that have to do with anything?”
Max Lirpa was nowhere to be seen.
Probably off drinking, Nina surmised, with Tom Broussard.
One of the girls from the back of the room—Susan Alexander, to be exact, five foot four and short brown haired, so that she seemed a perfect imitation of Nina herself years and years and even decades ago—made her way into the combatants’ circle, and, with a show of great bravery, piped up:
“He was a prince! He was raised to be a prince!”
But LaMarcus was having none of it, and continued to roar at the half of the room that was facing him:
“Don’t mean nothing! The Dude has got to…move, man!”
“But he can’t!”
“What you tellin’ me that for?”
“What is going on here?” said Nina.
No one heard her.
No one even seemed aware that the door h
ad opened.
A slender boy with black-rimmed glasses—clearly not a football player but probably quite proficient with computers and deeply involved in social networking—shouted:
“It’s self defense!”
Then everyone seemed to want to talk at once:
“It’s not self defense!”
“What was he gonna do? They attacked him, man! And they was four of them.”
“But it’s not like they came looking for him. They just told him to move!”
“Would you have moved?”
“For a damned king? You better...know it!”
“He didn’t know that was a king!”
“Don’t matter who it was, common sense be tellin’ you to move!”
“But they didn’t see it that way in those days!”
“Those days, these days, it’s all the same thing, man!”
“If you’re walking along the sidewalk and some dude comes up and pushes you off it, what are you gonna do?”
“I’m gonna whip his ass, man.”
“See?”
“But that’s me! I ain’t him!”
The room was bathed in the half light of a winter Mississippi mid-afternoon, For some reason, Nina allowed her eyes to rest upon a monstrous and grotesque piñata, which was used when Spanish was taught in the room, but which, proving far too great a distraction for other students in other classes, had been bolted tight to the ceiling.
The walls were covered with posters announcing various Shakespearian plays, for Max Lirpa was a lover of theater and was constantly in the habit of switching from one character’s voice to another as he taught.
How boring, he said constantly, to be trapped in the body and mind of one being.
The students loved it.
There! There in the back of the room was power forward—how strange that she now saw certain students only in terms of their position on the court—Amanda Billingsley.
She was waving her hand.
Don’t worry about getting called on, Amanda, Nina told herself, and, at least mentally, Amanda. Just jump right in there; nobody’s here to call on you anyway.
Where was Max Lirpa?
“It’s not a question of self defense or not self defense.”
“What is it a question of, then?”
Game Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 3) Page 17