Airball (7 page)

“There's a basketball on the front. And look what it says:
Great Plains League Champions, Boys' Varsity Basketball.
”

Bragger took the medal. He studied the front, then flipped it over. “The year's engraved on the back. Wow, this sucker's old. What is that, like eighteen years ago?”

“Eighteen years ago?” I plucked the medal from Bragger's fingers.

And stared at the date. Stared at the basketball medal glimmering in the palm of my hand. For a moment, I couldn't move. If this had been a movie instead of my pitiful ordinary life, light would've shone down, orchestra music would've swelled, and Bragger and I would've stared at each other in slow motion, stunned by the hugeness of the moment.

“Eighteen years ago,” I said, my voice barely a whisper. “Brett McGrew would've been a freshman in high school.” I looked up. “Do you realize what this means?”

“No,” said Bragger, obviously not stunned by the hugeness of the moment. “But I'm sure you'll tell me.”

“It means Brett McGrew was inside this prairie dog head.”

He looked at me sideways. “It does?”

“Yeah. Brett McGrew wore this costume with my mother. Think about it. My mom's the back of the prairie dog, and Brett McGrew's the front, because he's taller. And he's wearing his letter jacket, and this little wire thing gets caught on his medal, just like it got caught on my sweatshirt, only he doesn't realize it, just like I didn't at first, and when he pulls it off, he rips the medal off, too. And it gets stuck. Only he doesn't notice. And Brett McGrew's freshman-year league championship medal stays right here in my mother's prairie dog head for eighteen years.”

“Lucky thing you came along to find it,” said Bragger.

“You're right. I didn't even think about that. Eighteen years later, I come along, looking for evidence that will prove who Brett McGrew really is, who
I
really am, and I find his medal. Only you know what? It's not luck. It's more like, like fate. Like it was supposed to happen.”

“When you grow up, Kirby, you ought to think about writing soap operas. Seriously. You'd be good at it. Stuff like this happens a lot on Grandma's stories.”

I looked at him. “This is not Grandma's stories, Bragger. This is a basketball medal from Brett McGrew's freshman year that got stuck inside a prairie dog my mother used to wear. That's a fact. I didn't make it up.”

“Okay. Don't get mad.” He held his hands up. “All I'm saying is, there were probably twelve guys on that basketball team. Twelve guys who got medals. And eleven of them weren't Brett McGrew. That's all I'm saying. I'm just trying to be, you know, the voice of reason.”

Oh, yeah. Bragger Barnes, voice of reason.

We hauled the prairie dog up the back stairway and set it in the tub in the upstairs bathroom so it could dry out. I stashed the medal in my underwear drawer, inside one of my lucky Jayhawk sweat socks.

Because I knew what I had to do with it. I would take it with me to Lawrence, where I'd personally present it to Brett McGrew. After all these years, he'd probably given up hope of ever finding it again. He probably didn't even let himself think about it anymore because the memory was too painful.

And I, Kirby Nickel, would be the one to take that pain away. I would reunite Brett McGrew with his very first championship medal. He'd be so grateful he'd probably want to adopt me on the spot.

Which would make it a whole lot easier for me to tell him I was already his son.

Thirteen

The wild October wind swirled into a chill November blast. It whistled through town, plastering bits of litter flat against the playground fence and whipping the flags above the post office into a wind-beaten frenzy.

Something was whipping the town's good citizens into a frenzy, too, but it wasn't the wind.

I got my first whiff of it Monday after practice. Grandma was at the kitchen table sorting through mail when I got home. I banged through the back door and dropped my backpack onto a chair. Grandma didn't look up. Just handed me a folded-up newspaper article.

“Sports column,” she said. “My cousin Mildred up in Tonganoxie sent it. Clipped it out of Sunday's Kansas City
Star.
”

I unfolded it. J
AYHAWK
F
LIES
H
OME
, read the headline. Then in smaller print underneath,
Kansas's Favorite Son Returns to College to See Jersey Retired.

It was more than your ordinary sports column. It was half of the front page of the sports section, plus two pages on the inside. It documented Brett McGrew's entire career, from Stuckey High School to MVP of last year's NBA championship game. In color. With pictures.

I looked up at Grandma. “This was really nice of your cousin.”

“Huh.” Grandma was studying the water bill. “Not as nice as you might think. Mildred's always felt a little superior, living as close as she does to Kansas City.”

I scootched into a kitchen chair and smoothed the clipping out in front of me.

The column started with the usual stuff: college feats, NBA feats, awards, stats, records. Nothing I hadn't read a thousand times before. But I didn't mind. I'd read it again. Another thousand times probably.

But then I got to a section about Brett McGrew's humble beginnings:

Brett McGrew's basketball career started in the most unlikely of places: Stuckey, Kansas, population 334. It started the day Brett McGrew's father nailed a backboard to the side of his barn and held three-year-old Brett up to drop a basketball through the hoop.

I stopped reading, almost afraid to see what came next. This section of this article might be the very thing I needed. Exactly what I'd been searching for. The last crucial piece of evidence. Something from his years in Stuckey that would prove he was my father.

Not that I actually thought it would say, “And now that he's attained such success on the court, McNet's fondest wish is to connect with the son he left behind in his hometown.” But I did think it might mention something I could use. Maybe about the people who helped Brett McGrew get from Stuckey to national acclaim. Like, say, his high school basketball coach. Or his high school teammates. Or maybe his girlfriend. Maybe the article said something about my mother.

I glanced up at Grandma. She was flipping through the JCPenney sale flyer, not paying any attention to me. I pulled the paper closer and started reading again:

Since Brett McGrew's days as a high school player, Stuckey has hitched its reputation to its most famous—or should I say,
only
famous—son. No matter where you go in this one-stoplight town, from the water tower to the lone gas station, you're bombarded by signs, scoreboards, T-shirts, coffee mugs, matchbook covers, and bumper stickers, all proclaiming Stuckey as the “Basketball Capital of Kansas.” Which begs the question: Could this tiny windblown corner of the prairie really be the basketball capital of the entire state?

A glance through the Kansas high school record books provides an answer. While it's true that the Stuckey Prairie Dogs have played for the Kansas state high school championship four times—all four years Brett McGrew was in school, with McNet leading his team to victories in three of those games—Stuckey hasn't been to the playoffs before or since. Want to know how pathetic their record is? The town is sending its seventh-grade team to watch Brett McGrew's jersey retirement, and the Stuckey seventh graders haven't won a game in three years.

It's also true that, to this day, players from Stuckey hold the Kansas high school records for most career points, rebounds, steals, blocked shots, and free throws. But guess who holds them? Yep. Except for most steals, held by some obscure Stuckey guard nobody's ever heard of, Brett McGrew holds every single one of those records.

The verdict? The town's reputation rests on one guy, one amazing, legendary player: Brett “McNet” McGrew. Without him, Stuckey would have no claim to the title “Basketball Capital of Kansas.” It would more likely be “The Forgotten Armpit of Kansas.” But of course, that wouldn't sell as many bumper stickers.

Armpit?
I blinked. Wow.

I must've rustled the paper or something, because Grandma peered over her bifocals at me. “Guess you got to the part Mildred likes,” she said.

*   *   *

Unfortunately, Grandma and I weren't the only ones in Stuckey to get their hands on a copy of that sports column.

Within twenty-four hours, the Forgotten Armpit of Kansas had replaced Lloyd Metcalf's fancy new combine as the main topic of conversation at the Double Dribble. Mrs. Snodgrass had more coffee business that week than she'd had all fall, although she was losing some of her customers to the periodical section of the public library, which had suddenly become one of the most popular spots in town. Folks clogged the aisle, waiting their turn to read the library's lone copy of the Sunday Kansas City
Star.

Well. Mrs. Zimmer wasn't about to stand by and let a big-city paper like the
Star
sully the town's good name. No, sir. She fired off a letter to the editor, demanding a full apology. Then she marched down to the library and demanded that the librarian remove the offending sports section from the Sunday issue.

The librarian refused, of course. Even here in Stuckey we've heard of freedom of the press. But Mrs. Zimmer wasn't one to let a little thing like civil liberties stand in her way. She marched over to the periodical section herself and snapped the tattered sports section from the ninety-seven-year-old hands of Mr. Homer Hawkins. She tucked it in her purse and marched out of the library. “This article is good for only one thing,” she said as she rattled out the door. “Lighting a fire in my fireplace.”

“And she did it, too,” said Duncan. “Burned it up as soon as she got home.”

Duncan was always a reliable source of information, what with his mother running the only beauty parlor in town.

“Didn't do her much good, though,” Duncan added. “Somebody Xeroxed that column first thing Monday morning. Copies have been floating around town all week. My mom's got a whole stack of them by her cash register.”

Within twenty-four hours, everybody from here to Dodge City had heard that the seventh-grade team from the Armpit of Kansas was headed to Lawrence to honor Brett McGrew.

And Mrs. Zimmer was more upset about it than anybody at the beauty parlor realized.

Fourteen

The Wichita paper ran a small story about the “Forgotten Armpit” column on its inside pages, and a morning disc jockey at one of the radio stations over in Hutch kept playing a recording of a big armpit fart over and over all week long.

But other than that, the hubbub pretty much died down.

We thought.

Friday we bounded into the gym—the Stuckey seventh-grade Prairie Dogs, decked out in our practice duds. The hairs on my arms stood up as we milled around the ball cart waiting for Coach.

Because we were not alone.

Mrs. Zimmer and Mr. Dobbs were once again seated in the first row of bleachers. Mr. Dobbs leaned forward, elbows on his knees, staring at the toes of his work boots. Mrs. Zimmer sat up straight and tall, her laser eyes burning holes in the team.

“What are
they
doing here?” Bragger whispered.

I shrugged.

The locker room door banged open. Coach marched into the gym and stopped in front of us, clipboard in one fist, whistle in the other. He studied Mrs. Zimmer. He shook his head, glared at the team, and barked, “Is this a tea party, or are you people here to play basketball?”

Coach led us through stretches and wind sprints, pivots and passing drills. Then we faced off in a scrimmage.

And I didn't think we did too bad, considering that we were, well, us. Bragger made two baskets. So did Eddie. Russell sank one. I even hit the rim a couple of times. We got only two balls stuck behind the backboard, and we kept our nosebleed total down to one.

Mine.

It was Duncan's sweat glands that finally did us in.

Duncan is a sweaty kid. No way around it. When he gets to running up and down a basketball court, he turns into a regular fountain. And he didn't even have a T-shirt on to sop up the excess. We were playing shirts and skins, and Duncan, regrettably, was a skin.

Eddie rebounded one of Bragger's missed three-pointers and passed to Russell. At that same moment, Duncan tripped and, purely by accident, picked off the pass.

After snagging the basketball like that, Duncan wasn't taking any chances. He hugged the ball tight to his bare, lathered-up belly and wrapped both arms around it so Russell couldn't slap it away. Then, in what could've been an amazing move, Duncan faked to his left, broke to his right, and drove in for the easy basket.

Easy.
Right.
In somebody else's universe.

You could tell right away Duncan was headed for trouble. Direct contact with his armpits hadn't helped the ball any, plus Duncan's stomach is not as lean and firm as it could be.

He bounded toward the basket. His right hand flew out, ready to dribble.

But the ball stayed put.

Duncan's sweat had caused such a suction between his skin and the leather of the basketball that for a split second, the ball remained stuck to his belly button. Just long enough for Duncan to take two steps and look really confused. Then the ball tore loose with a big
slurp
and bounced out of bounds.

Coach blew his whistle and called Duncan for traveling.

Mrs. Zimmer slammed her notebook shut and stood up.

I was still standing on the sidelines with toilet paper up my nose, so I saw her first. She marched across the gym, her sturdy brown shoes squeaking against the wood floor. Mr. Dobbs clomped along behind. They stopped in front of Coach.