The Sidekick, page 5
“You okay?”
He didn’t answer for a second, so I said, “Everything all right?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
“Coach Caukwell told me to get you.”
“Tell him I’m coming.”
“You tell him you’re coming.” And then: “Did you just take a crap?”
“It helps me relax,” he said. I was still talking to him through the stall door.
“How relaxed do you want to get? Open the damn door. It’s game time.”
He opened the door and came out. But he looked funny; there was sweat shining on his forehead, under the hairline. I could hear the music coming out of his headphones, extremely loud.
“You okay?” I said again.
“I’m fine.” But his hands were shaking when he stuffed the Walkman in his bag; he had trouble with the zipper.
As we walked out through the double doors and into the gym, just for a second I put my hand on his back. I was holding one of the doors for him. There was a gap in the bleachers and one of the students called out—I don’t want to write what he said. He called me an N-lover, and somebody else laughed. Maybe it had nothing to do with putting my hand on Marcus’s back. The whole thing happened quickly and Marcus just kept walking, and afterward he never said anything about it either.
But that’s what it was like all game long, that was the atmosphere. Copperas Cove didn’t have any black players. We had five, including three starters. The refs were white, too. For the first quarter, Coach Caukwell went up and down the sideline trying to bend their ears, but afterward, in the huddle, he said to us, “I think y’all know by now we not gonna get the calls, so I don’t want to hear any bitching and moaning. Just shut up and play. If they want to play streetball we can do that, too.”
Then Gabe knocked down a couple threes, and Lamont came in and picked up some offensive boards. When he smacked the glass you could hear the contact of his hand, even over all that noise.
Marcus couldn’t hit a shot, he was too keyed up. Something else I noticed: when we practiced in the mornings before school, he used to hop a little on his jump shot but not much. He liked to keep himself under control. But in the game, with his juices flowing, he’d rise up two feet in the air, nobody could touch him. But his release had too much lift, he shot long and flat, and at halftime, Coach Caukwell told him point blank, “Marcus, you need to stop shooting.”
We were sitting on the slat benches by the dripping showers. Marcus couldn’t make eye contact. His leg had a loose wire in it that kept humming. Then Coach said, “I want you to take number seven. Pick him up full court. Make him feel you.”
Seven was Cyrus Millhouse, their six-four point guard who went on to play for Vanderbilt, and even made all-SEC his senior year. He was a dominant high-school player, because nobody who was big enough to guard him could keep in front of him. He had like thirteen points at halftime, six or seven boards, three assists; the score was 29–29.
Caukwell said, “Nobody gets showered after the game, nobody gets changed. When the whistle blows you get your bags and walk out. I don’t care what happens, nobody says nothing to nobody. I’ll make sure the driver has the engine running.”
Then the horn sounded and we ran back on stage.
The first time Cyrus took the inbounds, he tried a little left-right shimmy at his own free-throw line and Marcus picked his pocket and strolled in for a layup. The second time, Cyrus used his ass. He kept backing and shifting, like a truck in reverse, working his way up court from side to side, but then Marcus “pulled the chair” and Cyrus almost fell over. Another pick, another layup. After that, they let someone else bring the ball up.
These days Cyrus Millhouse is a scout for the Bucks; sometimes I run into him and we talk about Marcus. He remembers that game, too. He says, it’s the first time I was ever really guarded, when I even knew what that meant.
But it was still a close game, and with about a minute left, Copperas Cove started fouling. Breon missed the front end of a one-and-one, and then they came down and scored on a put-back, and the lead was four. Then Gabe missed another, and the lead was two. Coach Caukwell looked at me at the end of the bench; I hadn’t played a minute all game. There were thirty seconds left.
“You want to shoot some free throws?” he said. I was sitting on my hands to keep them warm. “Get on out there. Just remember to check in.”
“Should I shoot it … underhand?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I mean, do you care if I shoot it underhand?”
He looked at me, and what he said next sounds angry but wasn’t; somehow it calmed me down. “Brian, I don’t give a fuck.”
So that’s what happened. Nobody even guarded me the first time around. Gabe threw me the ball and I put my head down and swung my elbows and hung on. Eventually the whistle blew and I could see again. Then I had the long walk down court to the free-throw line.
I had to wipe the salt out of my eyes but my palms were sweaty too so that didn’t help. Getting fouled, swinging my elbows, feeling their hands on me, had activated my fight or flight response. But I bent down anyway, bounced the ball twice between my knees, rose up, and spun it two-handed toward the basket.
Because of the adrenaline rush the ball banged hard against the backboard and because of the spin it went in. The noise dropped and in the relative quiet I could hear somebody say, “Jesus H. Christ.” One of the referees. Then I made the second one, too.
That’s all we needed. Cyrus heaved a three-pointer at the rim, which rattled out, and Gabe picked up the rebound and threw the ball in the air. The horn sounded. The building was like a balloon with the air leaking away. It was just another Friday night, after eight o’clock, and a couple hundred kids suddenly had time on their hands; they had to get home. But Coach pulled us into a huddle anyway, by the side of the court. He said, “Remember what I told you. Shake their hands and let’s get out of here.”
So we lined up at center court, and they lined up, too. One of the kids called me a faggot, I don’t know what they said to anybody else. But Coach grabbed Lamont by the neck and we followed him to the bench. Kia stood there, surrounded by bags. Somebody must have said something to her, too, because Gabe had to be restrained—this time it was Breon who held him back. “It’s just the usual bullshit,” he said. “Just a bunch of crackers.” Then somebody came out of the stands to go after Breon, and Coach had to separate them.
“What did I tell you? What did I just say?”
But we got our bags and walked out. Caukwell in the rear, I was a couple of steps in front of him. The other coach was standing by the door, I guess to keep order, but Caukwell as we went past said something under his breath. Then we were outside, in the cool October air, and I could feel the heat of the running engine as I got on the bus.
“What did I tell you?” Caukwell was still steaming. I don’t know who he was talking to. “You think you get through life running your mouth?” Breon maybe, who had sat down stupidly in the line of fire, two rows from the font. “You need to be smarter than that. Don’t talk shit unless you got someone to back you up.”
“You backed me up,” Breon said.
“First and last time.”
And then we were driving away, out of the lot, through the small-town Texas streets, the stop signs coming back, the chain-link fences, the low houses with the lights on now, people having dinner, and then out onto the highway, where the noise of the road softened the mood again, an hour from home. I was sitting next to Marcus on one of the bench seats. He had his headphones on and his face against the cool window—there was nothing to see out there, just dark country. Everybody stank from the game, the whole bus, with the heating on now, but Marcus still smelled of sour guts.
I said, “Cheer up. We won,” and he looked at me and lowered the headphones around his neck.
“We won,” I said again.
“Don’t act like you did something ’cause you didn’t.”
Then he put his headphones on and turned back to the window.
It was almost ten when we pulled into the lot at Burleson; my dad had waited for me in the car. “Well,” he said, as I shouldered my bag into the back seat. “You stink like you played. How’d it go?” And I knew that if I told him it would make him happier than I could bear to see.
7
Betsy came home in parent mode, and we didn’t really get to talk until the kids went to bed. She made dinner, chicken pot pie—the kids didn’t like the pastry, so she just served the stew part over rice and put the rest of the pie in the oven so we could eat it later. In her own way, she’s an efficient woman. The house was a mess but she knew where to find what she needed, and everything that had to happen happened the way she wanted it to. But something was missing, too.
After a day at work (she was a project coordinator for the Sierra Club), I can understand she didn’t care much what she looked like. She had two children, she was almost forty years old, but her attitude to her appearance had turned into my attitude to my appearance, and it didn’t used to be. Her red hair had grayed or faded, it was frazzled, too, about shoulder-length, and she pulled it out of her eyes with a ponytail. But she wasn’t very careful and loose strands of hair sprayed around her face like static.
When Troy didn’t finish his plate, she finished it for him. She didn’t like throwing food away, but she’d also put on weight, and she said, when she forked another dollop of chicken mush into her mouth, “This is why I need to lose twenty pounds.”
If I didn’t know her and hadn’t grown up with her, if I met her for the first time now, I’d think, you’re a middle-aged woman, which is of course what she was. She looked like our mother.
At the airport, I’d managed to pick up some Celtics gear, a softball-sized basketball for Troy and a cap for Albert. Albert said thank you, he had reached the age of politeness, and put it on the table, and Betsy said, “Why don’t you try it on?” so he tried it on. “Look at you,” she said and he said thank you again. And his mom said, “Stop being so polite.”
“What should I be instead?” he asked her.
This seemed a reasonable question. He had gotten glasses since I saw him last, black-framed Woody Allens. They hid his face the way a kid like that wants to be partly hidden. But with Troy it was easier to break through. I played catch for a minute, throwing the ball into his little kid-gut, so he couldn’t help but catch it, and praising him afterward. Then I got bored and picked him up and put him on my head.
Betsy said, “Watch out for the ceiling fan.” All the rooms in the house had a ceiling fan over the light fixture.
“What does he look like?” I asked.
“He looks like a kid on a head.”
“No, I mean, happy or sad.”
“He looks worried,” my sister told me. But when I put Troy down again, slinging him over my shoulder and letting him slip down my back, he said, “Again.” So I figured introductions were made.
Greg came home around eight o’clock and opened a bottle of beer. He gave me one, too. Betsy poured herself a glass of wine and wandered back and forth from the bathroom to the kitchen, to check on the kids. She said, “Troy wants to show you something, he wants you to come look,” so I took my beer into the bathroom and looked. Albert was sitting in the bath, too. He had his glasses on, he was reading a book.
“What’you reading, kid?”
He looked at the cover before answering. The Mystery of Cabin Island.
It was one of my old Hardy Boys. “That’s one of my old books,” I said, and then, like a dumbo, “Don’t get it wet.” So Betsy stepped in. “Be careful,” and we had to go through the whole thing, “I am careful,” and so on, and I had to watch. Eventually I said, to break it up, “What did you want to show me?” and got down on my knees to make eye-level contact with Troy. He had the new ball in the bath, and when he pulled it underwater and let go, it sprayed upward in a little fountain.
Albert said, “You’re making me wet.”
In the kitchen again, Betsy said, not really to me or Greg but just out loud, “Greg can take them out of the tub. He always puts them to bed,” and Greg disappeared. I said to Betsy, “They’re not exactly interactive,” and she said, “What do you mean?”
“I mean, in the bath.”
“It’s usually better when they don’t interact,” she said. “That’s probably true for all of us.”
It was nine o’clock before we sat down to dinner, under the yellow lamp. Betsy laid out the green rose tablecloth we used to eat on as kids. “What’s the special occasion?” Greg said, and Betsy didn’t answer.
Mostly we talked about Dad. His medical conditions. He was on warfarin for the blood clots and had to shoot up with insulin before every meal. There were other pills in his pillbox I didn’t even know what they were. He was a heavily medicated individual. In the old days, you just got old, now you became a walking pharmacy. Greg mostly stayed out of it. He was my age, a little younger than Betsy, a lawyer for Planned Parenthood, blandly handsome, a good guy—one of those very sweet, very mild men and my sister was clearly incredibly frustrated by him. He overpraised her cooking and after dinner she said, “Greg can clear up. I’m going outside on the porch to smoke a cigarette. Come talk to me,” she said.
“I wish you wouldn’t.” Greg finally showed a little backbone. His voice was level, he said it like he said everything else. “Albert’s going to wake up one of these days and see you. He can smell it from his room,” but she ignored him.
“You coming or not?” she said to me, after taking a pack from her overcoat by the door.
“You’re not very nice to him,” I told her.
We sat on the porch steps, it wasn’t really warm enough. Across the road, you could see the corner of the park, and under the streetlamps, the playground, the jungle gym, the blue curve of the slide, and then the basketball court on the field below, pale in the artificial glow—the weirdly heartbreaking silhouette of an empty net hanging from a rim leaning off a pole. Beyond that, Waller Creek, and the thicker traffic moving along 45th Street.
“Yeah well,” she said.
I started picking at the dirt under my nails, in the light from the hallway coming through the glass in the front door.
“That’s a disgusting habit,” she said.
“It’s disgusting to have dirt under your nails.”
And she looked like she was going to say something else but didn’t. Then she said, “How’s Dad?”
“You’re changing the subject.”
“I didn’t know there was a subject. Okay, let’s talk about your hygiene.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know what you meant but I don’t want to discuss it.”
This shut us up for a while. I felt like, if you’re going to play the big sister, fine, but you start the conversation. Finally, she asked, “What does he do all day?”
“He sits around. He watches sports.”
“That sounds depressing.”
“What do you think I do all day?”
“At least it’s your job.”
“Does that make it better?” And I laughed.
A car went by, the kind of Volvo station wagon the neighborhood used to be full of, but now you saw a lot of SUVs and upmarket sedans. There was an intersection at the corner, with four-way stop signs, but the streets were wide and quiet. Not many sidewalks; front yard trees leaned over and cast their shade in the road. I liked being a kid here and it seemed like a place where, if you had a house and kids, you should be happy, too.
“You doing okay?” my sister asked.
“Eh,” I said.
“I know I owe you something for taking on Dad. It’s my turn and I want to do my bit but not now. Now is not a good time for me.”
“Dad is fine,” I said. “He keeps me company, he gives me something to worry about.”
“Well, I’ve said what I wanted to say. It’s too cold to sit out here anyway.” And Betsy stood up, pushing against her knees.
Greg had gone to bed when we came back in. The table was cleared, the chicken pot lay drying on the counter. Betsy said, “Let me just make up the sofa,” and when I tried to help, she said, “Please.” So I watched her move the coffee table and pull out the mattress and get sheets from the hall and unroll the comforter and eventually got bored and figured I might as well use the bathroom and get out of her way. The door to my old bedroom was open. Troy liked to sleep with the hall light coming in, and I could see his crib under the side window and another bed that looked recently slept in, with sheets and blankets and pillows tangled up in each other. Maybe Betsy sometimes used it if Troy had a fever, or maybe she just slept there anyway. But this wasn’t my business so I took my toothbrush to the bathroom and did the usual song and dance, drying my face afterward on one of the kids’ bath towels. When I came back out the sofa bed was made.
“I can’t pretend you’re going to get much sleep,” Betsy said. “The kids have to be out of the house by eight o’clock. Greg usually leaves around seven thirty, but he’s quiet, he doesn’t make much noise.”
“It’s just nice to be here,” I said, and she said, “If you say so.”
I can’t sleep anywhere on the first night anyway. Not in hotels either, where you have to kick out the tucked-in sheets and the place stinks of air-conditioning and cheap carpeting, and there’s a TV, and you think, I’ll just see if something’s on and you lie there in the flickering glow with no real reason to turn it off.
The house you grew up in casts a weird spell. I could hear the dryer in the utility room, and a clock ticking (even the cheap Ikea clocks, battery-powered, turn out to be audible in darkness), and from time to time the soft breathing of the heating vents. Austin in February, especially after a sunny day, gets cold at night. The heating came on and off, the furnace started to rev and then suddenly relaxed again, and after a minute the chill crept back, and you waited for the next surge of hot air. When I closed my eyes I could feel the faint glare of the streetlamp coming from the park across the street, but it was only ten o’clock, bedtime for people with small kids who have basically given up on the idea of an evening.
