Dance Real Slow (11 page)

“Why're you late?” I ask.

“Just one of those unavoidable things, you know?”

“No, I don't know. I believe this is what's called getting off to a bad start. So let's try again. Why are you late?”

“Girl problems,” he answers, rising to his feet.

Someone mutters something under his breath about a person named Ann and a few of the other boys snicker.

“Look, y'all don't have to be here if you've got better things to do with your time,” I say, preparing to kick a basketball from out of my path. But I stop, realizing I sound an awful lot like my father when he was coaching. These are boys, simply boys, and this is a game. It should be fun. Which is something my father, in his later years, simply forgot. “I didn't really mean that. Well, I did, but not in that tone. Nobody has to be here if they don't want. Really. But if you do, let's try and accord each other a little respect. If someone has trouble at home, or with school or a girl,” I say, glancing at Noah, “then I'd be glad to talk to him about it. I know I'm new and you don't know me from Adam, but I'm a pretty good
listener. Christ, it hasn't been all that long since I was in high school. Right, Cal?” Calvin is steering the hamper of balls around in circles, but he pretends to know what I am talking about and he answers with a nod. “Otherwise, let's try and get here on time.”

They play forty minutes of basketball, enough for me to get a rough idea of how much talent each boy has. Eric Shaw is spectacular, clearly the best, with Noah Ward and a boy named Russell Johns next. After the scrimmage, they distribute a few balls and tell me they have to punch out—which means make one final long-range shot before exiting the gym. They scurry, chasing down missed baskets nearly as fast as they hoist them. In several minutes, only Cy Connell is left. He is painfully thin, with a slight curve to his posture raising unavoidably between his shoulder blades. A gray pallor about his cheeks and neck makes the dark, half-moon-shaped wells below his eyes appear almost black. When shooting, he lowers the ball close to his chest, like Calvin, so as to get all his weight behind each effort. If he did this in a game, the ball would be blocked before it rose above his forehead. Most of his shots do not even strike the rim or backboard, and after a few more, he turns to see if I am still watching.

“You'll be here all night,” says Noah, heading off to the locker room.

I move to where Cy is standing, placing my hands on his triceps.

“First, you've got to try and shoot from here,” I say, pushing his arms up so his elbows are level with his shoulders. “It'll take some getting used to. And walk in
a few steps. There's no reason for you to be this far back.”

“You're not supposed to punch out from close.”

“Who says?”

“I'm not sure,” he answers. “It's just the way everyone else does it.”

“Maybe you're not everyone else.”

When he shoots above his face, as I've shown him, the ball twists off to the left, dropping even shorter of its goal than the old way. He tries several more and I tell him it looks better, although I am lying.

Crunched against the far wall, his knees near his ears, Calvin watches, puckering his lips as if he swallowed something sour. For a brief moment, in the refracted school-hall light, he resembles his mother, this image I have of her not long after we discovered she was pregnant. She was resting on the stairs to our apartment building, late-afternoon sunshine banking off the picture window above her shoulders, as she sucked the pink and purple and blue sand from a bag of Pixy Stix. Later, in the darkness of our bedroom, I awakened and walked to the kitchen for a glass of tap water. When I returned to our bed, I recall wishing it could always be like that afternoon: Kate waiting for me at home, alone, her hair tied back loosely with a cotton band, her mouth powdered with granules of sweet, colored sugar. Pregnant. We could hold our lives like a spool of twine, letting it unravel at whatever speed we chose. Then, watching the bed, her chest slowly sinking and climbing, I had a series of horrible thoughts, appalling premonitions that I would force an accident with a delicate shove or errant elbow—bony, direct. An accident that might cause the fetus
to abort. Leak down Kate's thighs in soupy yokes of blood—tissue as delicate and transparent as rice paper.

Eventually, the feelings subsided. There were other times, though, in the ensuing months when those same thoughts would rise again like a watery blister, hateful and hot.

The first thing Calvin does when we get home is to take our basketball out and try to dribble it across the porch. Of course, he is unable to, and after a few pats the ball rolls away from him, bounceless. He chases after it, again lifting the ball chest-high and then releasing it, slapping it with both palms. This time, the ball caroms off his foot and down the stairs.

“What're you doing?” I ask.

“I'm just gonna play a little.”

“No, you're not. You told me you were hungry.”

“That was before.”

“Before what?”

He pauses, looking puzzled, and then says, “Just before.”

“Calvin, it's too dark to play now. Besides, if you don't eat soon you're going to get a Belly Cat.”

When Calvin was younger and got hunger pangs, Kate would place her ear to his stomach and say, “Hey, do you hear that growling? I know what your problem is, you've got a cat in there. A Belly Cat.”

“I don't have Billy Cat,” he says, descending the stairs, his hand at nose level, gripping the rail. “I had him before.”

“See, that's worse. He's gone hiding and now he's gonna come back even meaner.”

“Uh-uh.”

“Sure is. So come on and let's get something in there.”

After dinner, Calvin and I sit in a hammock that is strung from column to column on the side of the porch. We are eating brownies that Mrs. Grafton baked and left on a cellophane-covered plate in our kitchen. The two of us swing back and forth, my feet grounded, Calvin's barely hanging over the edge, toes pointed inward. When I kick us higher, he turns to me and says “Whoa,” flashing teeth coated in fudgy mortar.

“Did you like that today?” I ask.

He nods and then takes another bite of brownie.

“Do you think you'd like to do it for a while?”

He shrugs. “Everday?” he manages, brown spittle flecking his chest.

“Maybe not every day. I mean, some days you'd go over to Meg's house, and other days you'd stay with Mrs. Grafton.”

“I like all the balls.”

“Yeah, I know you do. You never saw that many in one place, huh?”

He shakes his head. Sitting up, he tries to climb off, but his hand slips through the rope webbing.

“Where are you going?”

“I wanna get another brownie, before I lose my ap'tite.”

I lift him across my lap, holding his dirty hands close
to his belt buckle, so they won't wipe off on anything else.

“Hang on a second. I want to talk to you about something. Do you know what I was doing today?”

“Uh-uh.”

“I was coaching basketball—or at least trying.”

“Are you gonna still have your office?”

“Oh, sure. I'm just doing this to help out.”

“Help who?”

“To help Mr. Miller, the regular basketball coach. To help the school. And to help the kids, I suppose.”

“I liked the kids.”

I smile and brush brownie from his chin. “They liked you, too.” At times, it is difficult to know exactly what to say to a little boy, what he's equipped to understand.

Calvin knots up the corner of his mouth and shrugs.

“You know what I was just telling you, about coaching basketball? About being a basketball coach? Well, that's what my own father used to do. That was his job.”

“He's from Kansas?”

“No, he wasn't from Kansas. He coached at a school in Ohio. You once visited him there when you were a baby.”

“A long time ago.”

“Not so long,” I say, loosening my grip on his hands. “About four years.” I lower Calvin to the ground and tell him to be careful not to tip the plate over and spill the brownies. I also tell him to take only one.

When he returns, he sits on the chafed wooden floorboards in front of me, his legs pressed flat.

“You didn't bring me any?” I ask, furrowing my eyebrows and pretending to look angry. But Calvin is not fooled. He has seen this act before. “No milk, either?”

“It's too high.”

“Too high, huh? How come I've seen you pull a chair over to get cookies down from the cupboard, but you don't do it for the milk?”

“It's 'cuz …” He stops, looking around for something to occupy my attention, to take my mind off the question. “Well, ‘cuz the floor is slippery by the milk and I don't wanna fall.”

“That's good,” I say. “But I don't think you should chance it anywhere in there, okay? No more standing on chairs to get things down.”

He drops his head, stuffing the last corner of brownie into his mouth.

“Hey, Cal. Do we understand each other here?”

Reluctantly, he nods and lets out a brownie-muffled “Uh-huh.” And then, “Did I see all the balls in Ohio?”

It is a peculiar question, but I know exactly what he's talking about. “I'm not sure. I know they were there—more even. But you were so tiny that I'm not sure we brought you into the gym. We didn't want you to get hurt.”

“Oh.”

Everything is still, so quiet that I can hear the din of the refrigerator through the screen door. Calvin lies back and begins to make mock snow angels against the wood. “I bet I did see the balls,” he says. And then he stops.

It is simply another small piece of my life, I tell myself, thinking now of these newfound duties as basketball coach. It's just a piece whose shape I'm not sure of yet. Sitting in the cramped, boxy office of Tarent High's physical-education staff, I wipe the sweat from my face and the back of my neck, using a nubby orange towel. Noah Ward is standing akimbo in the doorway, eagerly shifting his weight from one leg to the other. He wants his earring, which I made him remove during practice and surrender to me. It was his third warning, and as I explained to him earlier, I am not opposed to ear wear on men, I just don't want it getting caught on someone else's shirt and ripping open his earlobe. Today, it is a petite diamond stud and I take it from my breast pocket and flip it to him.

“The backing's gone,” he says.

“What?”

He holds the earring up to the light, turning it by
the face so that I can only see the slender gold stem sticking out.

“See, the back part's missing. That's what holds it onto my ear.”

Pressing my shirt breast flat, I can feel the tiny backing clinging to the stitching at the bottom of my pocket. I dangle two fingers down and retrieve it, handing Noah the butterfly-shaped piece of metal.

“Thanks,” he says, sarcastically, and then turns to leave.

“Hey!”

Noah stops in the hallway, but does not look back.

“In case you hadn't noticed, you're starting to piss me off. I won't cut anybody from this team for not being good enough. But I will cut someone for being an asshole.”

As he leaves, the bulb in the table lamp flickers and then, with a wispy pop, burns out. I sit in the dark, my hands spread out like enormous spiders over my kneecaps.

“What do you think about someone who won't listen?” I ask aloud, to myself. In a moment, the words are gone, as swiftly and trail-less as they came. Like something my father would have said, maybe to one of his own players or maybe to me, not really expecting an answer.

More than he needs basketball or permissive girlfriends or diamond earrings, big ones, this boy, Noah, wants to leave Tarent; he wants to abandon his family and Kansas and the Middle West. In ways, some ways, he is like me at that age. Nothing in his life, now, will
fit. It is time to move on, to find other people with whom to connect. Twice, when I was young, I ran away from home—once for six hours and another time for almost three days. It is difficult for those around you to know, exactly, how to repair what, to them, doesn't seem broken. For Noah, and perhaps Calvin one day, I jab blindly at commonalities: something that will not cause him to cringe, something that will not create distance. But maybe, with Noah, I'm just not so good. Finally, ultimately, I don't understand—as my father didn't understand with me.

Carl Miller has left half a pack of cigarettes in his desk drawer and I feel around for matches. The cigarettes are unfiltered and they burn my lungs as I take a draw. Someone has turned out the light in the hallway, leaving only the tack-sized glow of the cigarette to break the darkness. Holding to an independent, bottomless timbre, I can hear the boys' voices echo from within the showers. There is a leathery slapping sound and then a loud voice warns everyone to watch out for flying soap. In six days we will play our first game, against nearby Carbon Springs, and I wonder how a coach is supposed to know when (and if) his team is ready. Certainly, it will become apparent after the game begins. But what about before then? Although I have told them on several occasions that it really doesn't matter to me whether or not we win, I am not sure they believe it. We underestimate the minds of youth, fresh and steady as rain.

The end of the cigarette has grown soggy with saliva, sticking to a crease in my lower lip. Yesterday Calvin
received a postcard from Kate, who is still in Bali, but I haven't read it to him yet. I will wait. The postcard depicts a green lizard flicking its shiny tongue, with the words
Greetings from Bali
written in light gray cursive across the top. She apologizes (to both of us) for not calling before she left, but says she had last-minute trouble with her passport. She tells Calvin that there are lizards and chameleons everywhere and people have to look down when they walk so they won't step on them. Calvin will love this, she imagines. He will ask me if we can go there, too. And if I were a father with money, lots of it, I would take him and let him collect as many lizards and chameleons as his spindly arms could carry.