“They say, ‘Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s Superman!’ Now do they say that or do they not say that?”

  “Yeah, they said it,” Ox said, “but they didn’t say how he got up in the sky.”

  “They put him with a bird and a plane, man!” Paul said. “You ever see a bird leap? You ever see a plane leap? No, they’re flying and Superman is flying, too! That is why he wears that cape, to help him keep himself stabilized!”

  “He wears that cape because that’s the cape his daddy gave him to wear,” Ox said. “Didn’t you see the picture?”

  “How come he got to wear an S on his chest, man?” Jo-Jo asked.

  “In case he forget his name?”

  “We got to have a meeting,” I said. “Let’s go into the office and rap.”

  “About Superman?”

  I ignored Paul, and we went on into the center. Ox had the keys out, but he saw the door was open.

  “Oh, man!” Ox stopped dead in his tracks. “Oh, no!”

  I pushed by Ox and looked in. The place was a shambles. Everything that had been standing had been thrown over. The pictures we had on the wall were torn down. The record player was broken, and the records were all over the floor. You could see the heel marks on the records that weren’t broken. All the drawers had been taken out of the old desk we had and thrown on the floor. Ox, standing next to me, pushed out one foot and lifted a torn record cover. Under it was Sparrow, his parakeet.

  “Oh, man … oh, man …” Ox knelt on the pile of records and gently lifted the dead bird. He held it in his two hands and looked down at it like he didn’t believe what he saw. “Oh, man … I ain’t never had nothing living before. I ain’t even had a plant or nothing that really lived …”

  In Ox’s huge black hands the dead bird looked like a child’s feather toy. The tears were running down his face, and his mouth was open as if there were things to say he just couldn’t get out. I felt sorry for him, and at the same time I was wondering how it was that a guy as big as Ox had something so fragile to hold onto. I was sorry for the dude, and ashamed of the way he just broke down.

  We looked for places to put our eyes, but the sound of Ox’s crying, softer now than it was, kept pulling us back to him. I caught Paul’s eyes for a moment, and we both looked away from each other quickly. The whole thing was too close to us, too real, and too intimidating to let on that we even knew about it.

  “Must have been a junkie,” Paul said.

  “A junkie ain’t got the time to be doing all this,” I said. “Whoever was here took his damn time. He wanted to hurt us.”

  “Why he want to hurt us?” Walter was pushing through the stuff with his foot.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But for some simple dudes like us there’s sure a lot of stuff going on.”

  “Like what?” Paul asked.

  I didn’t answer. I leaned against the wall and watched as Ox put Sparrow in a box. Some of the other guys started to clean up a little and then just said, “The hell with it.” It wasn’t worth it. Breeze got all his cassettes together even though they were broken. That was cool, and I started to get my stuff up, but then I didn’t feel like it.

  Finally I told them that I had been up to O’Donnel’s place and how he had said that he didn’t want Cal to be the coach because he didn’t dig Cal. Everybody said, “Later,” for O’Donnel. I left it at that.

  We played five games in three days against the other teams in our tournament. We won all five, too. The team wasn’t playing that together, but we were still kicking rump. When we played the last game, Cal told us to imagine that we were twenty points behind from the get-go and that we had to make a comeback. We won by six points, and Cal chewed us out. He said it was a raggedy game. Most of us knew it was, but we had won. That was the important thing.

  Mary-Ann was coming to the games, but she was being different. I couldn’t say nothing to her that she wanted to hear. Still, I wanted her to be around.

  Cal started us back into the practice thing again, which didn’t go down too cool. Everybody said we would really get down to business when the Tournament of Champions started. Cal was pushing a little too hard. Everybody wanted to win, but he was acting like he was going to be playing instead of us. Ox told him that, too.

  “You guys ain’t men enough to play with me,” he said. He laid it down like he meant it, too. A couple of cats caught attitudes behind that, and the practices tailed off again.

  I was getting too many things on my mind. Everywhere I turned there was something to worry about. I kept on telling myself to cool out, but it wasn’t happening. I rapped a little to Mary-Ann about it and that helped some, and I dug on how much I was getting out of being with her and telling her what was on my mind. I hadn’t told her about Cal getting into trouble before. I guess I didn’t want her to think anything bad about the dude, but finally it came out. I had taken her to a flick, and we were waiting for the train at Forty-deuce.

  “Me and Cal went up to see one of the tournament directors last week,” I said. “He was trying to give Cal some static about something he did a long time ago.”

  “What he do?” she asked.

  “He got accused of shaving points,” I said, hoping it didn’t sound so bad.

  “Is that cheating?” she asked.

  “What you mean, ‘cheating’?” I asked.

  “You don’t know what cheating means?”

  “Yeah, he was cheating,” I said. “Anyway, some dude named Russia or Rassha or something like that called this whitey and told him.”

  “Rashid?” She looked at me sideways. “He called?”

  “Yeah, you know him?”

  The train came and we got on. It was crowded, and we got separated. We had to wait until 125th Street before the train emptied enough so we could get back together.

  “That’s Juno’s last name. Or the name he goes by anyway,” she said. “Juno Rashid. First his name was Juno Brown. Then he changed it to Abdul Rashid. But everybody kept calling him Juno, so then he just called himself Juno Rashid.”

  “He know Cal?” I asked.

  “How I know who he knows?” Mary-Ann said.

  I took Mary-Ann home and then called Cal’s place, and he didn’t answer. Sometimes he had been staying over with Aggie. I figured they were getting back together again or something. I looked in the telephone book under “A. Jones,” but I couldn’t find her number. Information said she had a number, but it wasn’t listed.

  “I want to run through a series of plays today,” Cal was saying when I got to the gym. “So that we can change from one play into the next without bringing the ball back outside to the top of the key. The first play will be from the top, and then the second will be from the corner.”

  I asked Cal if I could speak to him about something for a minute, and he said I could when we took a break. That ticked me off, and I gave him a look so he would know I had something important to run down. He still didn’t seem to dig it, so I went on with the plays. The plays were boss, but my heart wasn’t in it. I thought we were never going to take a break, but we finally did. Soon as he said, “Break,” everybody slumped to the floor except me. I went over to Cal.

  “Now, what was his name first?” he asked when I told him about what Mary-Ann had said.

  “First it was Juno Brown,” I said. “Then he switched it to Abdul Rashid and then Juno Rashid.”

  “How do you know this is the guy that called O’Donnel?”

  “How I know?” I looked at him. “I don’t know that this is the guy, but how many guys out here you know named Rashid and know anything about our team?”

  “How he know about the team?” Cal asked.

  I started to tell him that, and he held me up and said we would get together after practice. I couldn’t understand why he didn’t call the practice off and get on the case. He didn’t, though, and we worked the rest of the morning on plays.

  “Tomorrow night we have our first game,” he said. “This is the round-robin part of the tournament. From now on there’s going to be scouts in the crowds checking you out. Remember four things.…”

  He pulled out a piece of paper and started reading from it.

  “The first thing is that these coaches know basketball; you’re not going to impress them with any sloppy play. The second thing is that they already have their squads at their schools, and they’re looking for players who can fit in with their team, not be the team. Third, they’re looking for guys with a complete game. That means defense as well as offense. And last, and most important, don’t talk to any of them without my permission. I see you talking to anybody that even smells like a scout and I’m putting you on the bench for the next game. Everybody dig that?”

  Everybody said that they dug it, and Cal told us to go on home and report back to the gym the next night at six o’clock. I took a quick shower and then found Cal. He was talking to Matt Lee. I waited for him to finish, and then I went up to him. We went across town, and he took me down to Fifty-third Street to the Museum of Modern Art. We walked around there while we talked.

  “So how he know about the team?” he said.

  “I don’t know how he know,” I said. “I think he does, though.”

  “Why?” Cal asked

  I ran down the stuff about Paul getting into trouble with the guy who ran the club and that this Rashid character worked for the same guy. All the time I’m rapping Cal is looking at pictures, but I could tell his mind was working overtime. If I even said a word that he didn’t get, he would make me go back over it again. I told him all about the checks, how me and Mary-Ann had got them, about Ugly, the whole bit.

  “What you know about this guy who runs the club?” Cal asked.

  “He thinks he’s bad,” I said. “Always trying to style, showing off his bread and that kind of thing.”

  “Is he bad?”

  “He don’t look that bad to me,” I said. “I seen some bad dudes before. Badder than this guy.”

  “Yeah, and you and Mary-Ann went into his office and took the checks and he didn’t say nothing to nobody?”

  “No,” I said. “And he had to know it was gone because he was only in Chicago for a day, he couldn’t have forgot it.”

  Cal stopped dead in his tracks and looked at me. His face changed so quick I thought he was going off or something. He looked at me for a minute and then walked over to a bench that faced a large painting.

  “See this picture?” he said. “It’s about the Spanish Civil War.”

  “If you say so, man,” I said.

  “This cat from Chicago?” he asked.

  “I don’t know, but if he paints like that, Chicago must be a weird place!”

  “No, man, this Tyrone—what did you say his last name was?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “I got a call from some cat named Tyrone something—maybe Tyrone Giddins—wanted to talk to me about the team. He called once or twice and said something about being interested in helping out financially. I just told him to shove off.”

  He kept on talking to himself. At first he said a few words out loud, and then I could tell he was still talking to himself in his head because every once in a while he would nod to himself. I asked him what he thought it was all about, and he said he didn’t know, but he was sure going to try to find out.

  The day of the game I woke up nervous. Basketball never made me nervous before. Ox called up about fifteen minutes after I woke up, and he told me he was nervous, too. All right. I knew I had all day to kill, so I went over some of the diagrams of the plays, ran them in my mind until I could see them.

  Joni called to wish me luck. I asked her if she was going to wish Paul luck, too.

  “I just did,” she said. “He’s in the shower now.”

  “In the shower?”

  “Um-hm,” she whispered into the phone, “I wish it were you, darling. Maybe soon it will be. Good-bye.”

  She hung up the phone.

  Joni knew the kind of things to say. She knew how to say it, too. Even though I knew it was phony, and she knew it was phony, it still got next to me.

  The next team we played was half white, so I figured that they couldn’t be much. They had this one whitey they called Sweet Jesus who was supposed to hold me. He was about six four and had long hair and a beard. The sucker didn’t warm up and spent the whole time before the game with a towel on his head. I told Paul to send out for some soda because I was going to have the sucker’s heart for lunch. It didn’t quite come off that way.

  The first time the fool came downcourt he took me inside, got the ball, and dunked backwards. The next time he got the ball he told me he was going left, was going to stop, and throw in a soft jumper that wasn’t going to touch anything but the net and my ego. He did it, too. The fool had me believing he could walk on water by the third quarter. My best game was as good as his, and I think he knew it. I was playing my best game, too, and just wondering whether he was playing his. When I had the ball, he was on my case like a hungry dog on a pork chop. When he had the ball, I was doing everything I knew how to do and the cat was still getting his stuff off.

  We won the game, but it brought us back to earth. We were so tired afterwards we couldn’t even get off the benches in the locker room. But we had won, by one point.

  “If I wasn’t so tired,” Ox said, “I’d roll over and die.”

  Cal said that we had played well, that the team we had played against was really good and played much better team ball than we had.

  “That cat I was playing was pretty good,” I said.

  “Pretty good?” Cal laughed. “He’s as good as you are, man. You got to learn to play with cats as good as you are and some better. You did okay against him.”

  Joe Hare, the guy who keeps score at the gym where we play, came over and told me that the white cat had come over to the scoring table after the game and asked what my name was and what school I went to.

  “You give him my name?” I asked.

  “Sure did,” Joe said. “Said you weren’t sure what college you were going to, but you were leaning towards the Big Ten.”

  I grinned a little, I guess. I was glad he had come over and asked about me.

  Me and Walter were the last ones out of the locker room. We ran into some of the guys from the other team. They said they didn’t know the games were going to be that tough. I just shrugged, and Walter said something about the game not being that tough. That made them feel bad. I was a little sorry for them but still glad that it wasn’t me feeling bad.

  “Which way you going, coach?” I said to Cal, who was standing outside on the corner.

  “I’m waiting for a guy who’s supposed to pick me up,” Cal said. “Why don’t you guys go on? You know we got practice in the morning.”

  Just as we were going off, a car pulled up at the curb.

  We went on down the street, still talking about the game. We just couldn’t get enough of it. Walter started to say something about how nervous he had been, but he looked back and suddenly stopped talking.

  I looked back, too, and saw two guys standing on the corner in front of Cal. They looked like they were arguing, but I couldn’t be sure. Then one of them got into a car. The other one opened the back door of the car for Cal, and he got in. He had put his hand on Cal when he was getting in, and I couldn’t tell from where I was standing if he had pushed him or not. The car started up, and I stood near the edge of the sidewalk so I could look into it. When it went by me, Cal held up his hand as if everything was all right. Maybe it was.

  I went on over to my moms’s house, but she wasn’t there. I saw one of the neighbors, a skinny chick named Karen who must have been about fifty but who looked like she was thirty, and she said that she had seen my moms in the Spotlite on One-two-five Street. Later for that, I thought, and went over to the Grant. When I got over there, Mary-Ann was sitting in the lobby reading Ebony.

  “What you doing here?”

  “I ain’t got nothing else to do,” she said.

  We went on up to the room I was staying in, and I took a shower. When I got out, the tiredness from the game came down on me. Mary-Ann had some money, so I asked her to go out for some Chinese food.

  “I ain’t hungry,” she said.

  “Well, I am,” I said.

  “Let’s go out later.”

  “How you and your mama been getting along?”

  “Why you ask?”

  “Because you don’t come to the Grant unless you and her have a fight,” I said. “That’s why.”

  “We didn’t have no fight,” Mary-Ann said. She was lying on the bed, kind of halfheartedly going through the Ebony. “I just figured I’d come by and see what you were doing.”

  “Why don’t you cop a walk and come back in about an hour and a half so I can cop some rest, baby?” I said. “And why don’t you bring some Chinese food with you when you come back? Maybe some shrimp fried rice, or some moo goo gai pan, or even some ribs if your stash can carry it.”

  “Why don’t you just lay yourself on down and rest and then maybe later I’ll get up and get the food?” she said. “Unless you’re nervous about me being on the bed and all.”

  “Why not?” I didn’t feel like playing with the chick and all, but I lay down on the bed with her. All I had on was some cutoffs I wore around the place sometimes, but I really didn’t care too tough, I was so tired.

  “Lonnie?”

  “What?”

  “You like me?”

  “What you want me to say?”

  “How come you never hit on me?”

  “That ain’t what we’re about,” I said.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “You know, we ain’t about no bam-bam thing.”

  “You’ve had sex with other girls,” she said. “You want me to tell you who?”

  “Hey, I’m tired.”

  “Why don’t you want me?”

  “It’s not that I don’t want you,” I said. “It’s got to be different with you. It can’t be just—getting some. You know what I mean.”

  “Make it different,” she said. “You want to make it different? Tell me that you love me. Tell me what it means to you, what makes it different.”

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17