Rules for Becoming a Legend (24 page)

“Gracias.”

Kid Kirkus wants to play.

•   •   •

Later, Coach Kelly tells Principal McCarthy and Superintendent Berg that he has sat down with Jimmy for a real heart to heart, counseled the boy, and Jimmy is ready to become a contributing member of Fishermen basketball again. In fact, Jimmy's participation, in Coach Kelly's humble opinion, will be therapeutic.

Not surprisingly, Principal McCarthy gives his approval gift wrapped in a tearful pat on the back, saying, “You do so much for these kids, Paul, really above and beyond.”

It's Superintendent Berg's approval that Coach Kelly is nervous about. The man is famously strange in his feelings toward the Kirkuses. He remembers when he coached his boy, James, same years as Freight Train. Little athlete who could shoot, but the real gem in his play was his out-and-out hustle. Superintendent Berg was always pushing for more playing time, more touches for
James. It was hard though, what with Freight Train being a true star. What was Coach Kelly supposed to do? James was just born the wrong year, destined to be eclipsed by his best friend.

Seeing Superintendent Berg consider Jimmy's fate reminds Coach Kelly of that cold, cursed morning before the state finals when James Berg and his father came knocking on his hotel room door. James looked like he'd committed murder—hands shaking and skin almost blue—and maybe he had. His father was behind him, standing straight, staring righteously, terrifying—and this was before his promotion, he was still just a grade school principal then. When they told him that Todd had been out drinking, Coach Kelly pleaded with them. “Let's just wait, let's just think this through.” But “No,” Superintendent Berg said, “I've already called the
Register Guard
and the coach for Madras.” So Coach Kelly got up. Had to. Put on pants. Be the adult and get out there and discipline. Thinking,
This is ridiculous, he's the best player, why they want to get rid of the best player night before the big game?
And then he saw it, clear as anything, the naked ambition to get James Berg more touches in the championship game, showcase him for any college scouts watching, and it infuriated Coach Kelly.

He stormed down the hall and into Todd's room, hoping with everything in him that the accusation was false. But. Freight Train was on the floor, naked. Smell of booze almost overwhelming. Reporters were going to be there soon.
Oh, Jesus, son
. Phones were already ringing. Todd “Freight Train” Kirkus was big news. So Coach Kelly did what he thought he had to do. Suspended Todd. Faced up to the ridiculous Flying Finn with refried beans smeared on his face. All because this jackass, this Superintendent Berg, wanted more touches for his own kid.

Who cares that they won anyway because of timely shooting
from James? The whole thing still gives him acid reflux. He's felt for almost twenty years like an accomplice to Brutus.

So here and now, with an easy choice that will be understood by everyone, Superintendent Berg has the chance to keep another Kirkus off the court. Say it's the best for the kid that he doesn't play. And Coach Kelly knows he'll do it. Ban Jimmy. He just knows it. It won't be the final say in the matter, but it'll logjam the whole thing. There'll be petitions to get signed, a whole new level—maybe even state—of authority to get involved. Drag it out further when that's the last thing that Jimmy needs. The season will be through before anything is decided.

Coach Kelly knows he's going to get a no so he's already rising from his chair to storm off when Superintendent Berg opens his mouth.

And then the man says, “Well, if you think he's ready, then let him play,” and Coach Kelly trips over his chair. Bangs his knee pretty good. Yells out in what Superintendent Berg and Principal McCarthy assume is pain.

•   •   •

Out on Tapiola Park Courts Todd Kirkus readies his son to play basketball again. Word has come down that Jimmy Kirkus will be let back on the team in two weeks' time, and Jimmy wants it. Hungry for it. Todd has his work cut out for him. He's going to make the kid invincible.

He teaches Jimmy to constantly check the position of his body. “You must always, always be ready, son.” He shows him footage of Michael Jordan in his prime, every muscle in his lean body on the verge of firing. “Michael Jordan was the greatest to play the game because nobody could get the jump on him.”

He measures Jimmy's vertical and then builds wooden boxes, five in total, to simulate each stage in his leap. Jimmy has to stand
on these boxes, one after the other, and make nine shots in a row—“in honor of the Nine Games, the Ninth Shot, son,” Todd jokes—before he can move on to the next one. “This way, no matter what, you can shoot when it's clear to shoot, just wait until the right time during your jump.”

While they practice the Flying Finn rides his bike in tight circles around the two, taunting Jimmy in just the way Shooter Ackley did. “Yous got a crazy grandpa, yous gonna break your knees, yous too small!”
Jimmy learns to tune out everything but his body, the ball, the cement, and the hoop.

Todd makes his son run. He runs and runs and runs. He humps the hills and sprints the level roads. He jogs circles around the track and then off through the trails in the woods. Going, moving, always breathing.
If you want to be the best, you need to always keep moving.
So Jimmy keeps moving. Running miles and miles each day, his lungs expanding so they are powerful, so he only stops when he wants to—his body has no say.

Lastly, Todd works on his reflexes. He creates a game. Whenever Todd claps, Jimmy has to cup his hand into an
o
and spy his pops before his pops spies him. The advantage is with Todd, of course, as he's the one clapping. For every time that Todd spies his son before his son spies him, he gives him a weighted jogging bracelet that Jimmy must wear for the rest of the day. In the beginning Jimmy is so bad Todd has to put soup cans into the kid's pockets when they run out of bracelets. He is sore in the mornings from the weights he carried the day before.

By the end of the second week though, Jimmy is so laser quick, it's Todd who's eating his dinner with multicolored bracelets striped up each of his arms.

“This is some real
Rocky
shit, pops,” Jimmy says.

“‘Eye of the Tiger.'” Todd starts humming the intro, closes his
eyes, punches the air. And what's that there? A smile between Freight Train and Kamikaze?

•   •   •

Jimmy's almost there. Jimmy's almost ready.

Meanwhile, after everyone else has gone to bed, Jimmy stays up late in his bedroom, working on diagramming his mind. He meant for it to be one page, just like Carla's poem to him, but it's grown since then. He's about fifty pages through an eighty-page spiral-bound. Little snips of memory, glued-in pictures of sneakers he used to want, job ads for things he might do when he grows up, photos of his family—Suzie, Dex, Mom, Pops, and the crazy Flying Finn who thinks every photograph is a chance to show off all his teeth in an insane growl. He scribbles in small memories and feelings. Goes back to earlier entries to annotate what he had written with a different colored pen.

One night he wants an answer to a question that's buzzing in his head. He needs someone older. Can't talk to his pops and the Flying Finn is a clown. So he calls Sarah Parson, RN, instead. It's her cell and she's walking somewhere, wind brushing the microphone on gusts.

“Jimmy!” she says. “Been a while since you called. Thought you picked up a girlfriend or something.”

“You ever think about where you go when you die?” Jimmy asks.

“Jimmy . . .”

“Like, is it a good place? And if it is, then it's fine to like, be happy again, right? 'Cause then they're happy, wherever they are.”

“I've seen a few people die in the hospital, Jimmy, and let me tell you, it's neither as good or as bad as people make it out to be, it just is.”

Next he calls Carla.

“Hello?” her voice is soft, tired. He imagines her under the covers, in bed. He imagines her speaking across a pillow to him.

“You ever think about where you go when you die?”

Rustling. Maybe she's sitting up. It is a strange question, and coming from him, will just make him seem even weirder.

“I mean, just wondering,” he adds.

“No, I don't think about it.” Then she breathes in. “Maybe we'll never die. Maybe we'll be the first people to never die.”

Jimmy laughs—she's trying to be funny, he guesses—but what she said also makes him feel so much better.

Friday, March 17, 2006

JIMMY KIRKUS, FIFTEEN YEARS OLD—ONE YEAR AND NINE MONTHS UNTIL THE WALL.

C
oach Kelly loaded his team onto the bus for the annual post-season pizza party at Fultano's. “Come on, come on!” he shouted.

It was raining, and the players were pissed off. “What we got to celebrate?” Joe Looney asked aloud. Then he tilted his head up like he was talking to God. “Huh? Why is a 7 and 13 record reason to celebrate?”

“Oh zip it,” Coach Kelly said.

On their way to the bus, Ray put an arm around Jimmy. “Hey do me a favor,” he said. “Grab my jacket? It's in the gym. Bottom bleacher seat.”

“Sure, Ray, sure,” Jimmy said, voice so low it may as well have been groundwater.

“What's that?” Ray said, overloud. “Speak up, Freshman.”

“I'm going, OK?” He turned, headed back to the gym. Ray fucking Atto. Since Jimmy's meltdown against Seaside, the Fishermen hadn't won another game his freshman season. He was labeled as a soft player, and his nickname came to be Jimmy Soft. He was benched, and Ray, with his slow-down, draw-fouls, ugly style of play, became the focal point of the team.

Jimmy, meanwhile, became scared of his own shadow. Hell, he was scared of the thought of his own shadow. The flash, the buzz, the glamour were long gone. Other teams, all thanks to Shooter Ackley, had him dialed in. Put a little body on the kid, whisper in
his ear, and boom, he couldn't find his shot. Jimmy Kirkus wasn't so hot after all. Worst part of it all was Jimmy knew it and blamed himself. He did errands for Ray and the other upperclassmen without a second thought because everything in this world seemed penance.

As Jimmy scoured the bleachers he thought about this last week of practice. Whole season down the drain and most of the other players just messing around for fun. He'd been pushing himself, though. Over-practicing, if anything. And he was doing what he thought he should do. Getting on himself for every missed shot. Yelling, throwing up his fists, cussing. And none of it helped. He was still too jittery to make even simple passes, his shots inelegant knuckleballs pitched toward the hoop. His touch was gone and now all his extra practice, all that being hard on himself, hadn't amounted to anything. He'd been benched the whole season. He was sore and slow and everything hurt, and Ray's jacket was nowhere to be found. When he got back out to the parking lot, the bus was gone.

•   •   •

Jimmy wasn't angry at being left behind. By that point he was used to it and he'd slipped into a state of mind that told him he deserved everything bad that happened to him. Half-frozen lunchroom chicken fingers, Mr. Jackson's bad breath, and the never-ending rain that soaked Columbia City at least nine months out of the year: all a direct result of him losing his basketball grace.

Jimmy was so down on himself, he didn't wonder why there was no jacket where Ray said there'd be one, he just felt he had failed at finding the jacket like he failed at basketball, like he failed at life. He didn't get that it was both better and worse than that: he was just the butt of Ray's cruel joke, excluding him from the end-of-season celebration.

With nowhere else to go, Jimmy walked to Pedro's house. He couldn't bear going home to his pops and Dex and the always jabbering Flying Finn. When they asked him why he wasn't at the team's pizza party he'd have to tell them he was left behind. That he was so forgettable, the team didn't notice he wasn't there. Then his pops would do something embarrassing in the new sloppy version of himself. Ever since the game against Seaside, the man was a stereo with a broken volume knob. Always at ten. He'd taken up drinking again, which was the main thing, but he also didn't seem to care about what anyone else thought. Would openly glare at people in public he thought had wronged him, park his van diagonally across two, three spots at the grocery store, not shower on the days he had off—coffee on knee, eyes pinned to the gray horizon across the bay, as if something better would come out of there, but if he blinked, he'd miss it forever. Tell his pops about this and the man might drive down to Fultano's and make a scene.

As Jimmy walked he slipped into what was becoming a familiar routine for him. He imagined the Seaside game going differently, his streak as basketball golden boy continuing. He imagined a scenario where he was taller, stronger, and tougher than Shooter. Pushed him around all over the court. Then, back in the locker room, in this imagined world, he smacked Ray Atto in the mouth. The idiot would start crying, ask Jimmy to let up. And then later he and Dex and Pedro would go cruising to the beach—he could drive in these fantasies—and they had girls in the van, and they had a bonfire, and someone was playing the guitar, and he could feel that exhausted, emptied but somehow also filled up feeling of hooking up with a girl again.

On the way to Pedro's, Jimmy ran into the Goth crowd behind the baseball field. There was David Berg and all his freaky friends. Jimmy hadn't had much contact with David since they were little kids. It seemed David had spent the years after the Ninth Shot and
the Catch seething about one thing or another. Tinkering with little computer kits, taking apart radios, blasting out speakers. He had those slightly buggy eyes you see when people who never take off their glasses finally do. A puffy, sleepy vulnerability the lenses usually sharpen. Strangely, though, David Berg had never worn glasses a day in his life, at least not as far as Jimmy remembered.

David still played sports because his dad and grandpa forced him to but between classes or at lunch, he snuck to the corners of school where Mr. Berg would not see him and put on a different sort of uniform. Black T-shirts with silver spikes embedded in the collar, thick, black eye makeup, and inky leather chokers. Fuck the jocks. A freak uniform, Jimmy heard some people call it. Even during his junior varsity games David managed to apply eye makeup in the locker room during halftime. Drove his father and grandfather crazy in the stands when he came back onto the court looking like some effeminate rock star in gym shorts. Some kids called him Faggy Berg. Rumor had it that he spent his time trying to conjure the devil, listening to Swedish death metal, and huffing things out of paper sacks or loose air-conditioning tubes. To Jimmy it always seemed David was ill-fitting no matter his environment. He couldn't fully believe the hard edge, but he respected his willingness to be different.

“Hey look, it's a jock,” David said. It's the loudest Jimmy had heard him speak in eight years. Also, there was something strange in his voice: a giddiness that pegged him as high.

“A jock,” said one of his friends.

“Never seen a specimen outside its natural habitat.”

“Some sort of pygmy variety,” a fake British accent, “extremely rare.”

It was strange to our kid: The jocks considered him a freak, the freaks considered him a jock, and the nerds and stoners didn't
seem to consider him at all. Where'd that leave him? Standing here alone, facing this crowd of kids who hated him for something he couldn't even be, close to tears once again.

Then a skinny girl named Kelsey with golden eyes—almost yellow, strangely—and a cigarette hanging between her fingers that she jabbed to punctuate on everything she said, started making gorilla noises and the whole blacked-out crowd laughed and closed in. “Get it? Get it? I'm doing his mating call!”

Ray Atto and Joe Looney were famous for tormenting the Goth kids—or any outcasts for that matter. Their morning routine included busting into the bathroom the Goths favored and pissing all over the radiator. The corner of school they'd managed to carve out for themselves forever smelled of burned pee.

“Wait,” Jimmy said. He wanted to tell them that he'd never done anything like what Ray and Joe had done. In fact, most of the guys on the team wouldn't talk to him anymore and frequently slathered his underwear in Icy Hot. “Hey, wait.” He was closer to them than they thought.

One picked up a rock and threw it at Jimmy. Then another. Mob-think. Jimmy flinched and stared at David. David stared back. Then all of them were hurling rocks. Jimmy danced back, avoiding the poorly thrown stones—maybe they should have gone to gym once in a while—but he didn't run, stayed in range. There was a heady inevitability to it he couldn't break from—wouldn't break from. The prospect of being hurt felt like something to be leaned in to. A cleansing.

“The famous Jimmy Kirkus is all alone.”

“He's Jimmy
Soft
now.”

“Hey, yeah, Jimmy Soft.”

“You think it's 'cause he can't get it up?”

Big laughter all around. More stones, suffocating and too clouded to see through, to move past. Why
didn't
he run? He didn't owe it
to these cigarette-stub kids to stay around and be the outlet for their closed-circuit pain. Calling him Jimmy Soft, what did they know? Still, he hesitated, the signal to flee all jangled up, the circuits gone haywire. Fight or flight and Jimmy was stuck in the limbo between.

“Um, dude,” Kelsey with the almost-yellow eyes said, pointing her cigarette, “I think he's too stupid to run.”

They laughed.

“Makes sense,” David said. “He
is
a jock, after all.”

“Hey, wait, just wait,” Jimmy said.

If Dex had been there, he'd have knocked every one of those suckers' heads off—including the skinny chick's. But Jimmy was alone and didn't fight back, didn't yell; he just kept slowly backing away. He was soaked and he felt tiny. His weakness only spurred them on. Finally one of the jocks cut down to size. They caught him. Hands and feet, too many to count, pushed him, kicked him, punched him. Jimmy blocked what blows he could out of instinct, but failed to swing back. Finally he squirreled away. Ran a few yards and turned around, heaving. The Goth group fanned out. Surrounded him. They were closing in for round two.

A real dread was knotting in his chest. All the strands of his circumstance tangling bigger and bigger inside of him, taking up the space usually reserved for the work of vital organs. He was still standing, still alive, but he wouldn't have guessed his heart or lungs had anything to do with it. He felt a cold trembling as even his body betrayed him. No more full breaths, but tiny sips of air instead that did nothing. He could see in their collective, pot-clouded eyes the real damage and hurt coming. He regretted not running before.

“Hey, David,” he muttered. “Come on.”

“Jimmy, you're an asshole,” David Berg shouted. He picked up a
big rock, weighed it in his palm. His aim had always been good when it involved Jimmy's head. Jimmy didn't turn away. Too bogged down in soreness, in sorrow. It hit him over his right eyebrow. A slow bleed. He let out a soft, high-pitched whine.

“The fuck was that?” someone said.

•   •   •

Mr. Berg had been clearing out the winter scrum from the baseball clubhouse when he heard the yelling. Through the back window of the dugout, he looked up and saw the group of Goths, his son among them, surrounding Jimmy. Made Mr. Berg sick to see. Then he saw his own David throw a huge rock. Looked like it landed straight on Jimmy's eye.

He dropped the rake. “DAVIE!” he bellowed. He came running around the edge of the dugout, full speed up the little hill where the Goths liked to gather and fly their freak flag. They turned and saw him barreling toward them. They scattered into the woods, yelling, “Fuck you, old man,” confident that their number would hide who'd actually shouted the words.

Jimmy also took off running when he saw Mr. Berg—up the street while the Goths ran the opposite way, melting into the trees. Berg stood on the hill, looking between Jimmy disappearing one way, David the other. David stopped at the tree line, bit his lip as he stared at his father, held out his hands, like
what
. Then he turned, disappeared, howling like a madman.

Berg coughed something up, spit it out, and then ran after Jimmy. He was never going to find his son in those woods anyway, and even if he did there wouldn't be four clean words out of his mouth. Respect for your elders, yet another thing he hadn't done a good job of imparting.

•   •   •

In the backseat of McMahan's tinted-window car—because they hadn't been able to wait until the condo—Genny Mori surprised
herself by coming faster than normal. She shivered with the force of it and bit his fingertip, a feeling of expanding on making her insides as big as the whole world.

“Ouch,” he said in shock. He pulled his finger from her mouth, shook it in the air. She had drawn blood. They both laughed.

“Don't get blood on me,” Genny Mori said, shying from his hand. “He sees blood on me, he'll know.”

“It doesn't really matter, darling, he must already know.”

Genny Mori pushed McMahan back. This was a big deal, a real marriage, and his casualness belittled it, piqued her dread of an eventual come-clean, knockdown, breakup, to her and Todd's twenty years together. Calling her “darling.” That whole scene in the parking lot with Todd, that shouting, all those people making their own guesses, it hadn't meant anything to McMahan.

He didn't know what it was like to live with a man drunk and drowning at the same time. And Todd did already know about them, Genny was sure, somewhere deep down within himself. He just didn't want to face it. What a painful sight. Suddenly he was a guy who watched daytime TV, tallboy on the knee, enraptured by decorating schemes. Then a whip around the house, some desperate mission to get rid of every expired can of food present—sure of the deadly poison each one held. A man who both she and the Flying Finn began to avoid as deftly as they avoided each other.

And then there was the simple fact of her pride: that she didn't want to be seen as a slut, but now there it was, the whole town thought it. And still, it was a joke to McMahan. His wife was clueless, they were going on vacation to Mexico in a month, and here she was simmering in the looks being poured on her wherever she went. What they were doing, the wrongness of it, was on both of them, so how come she was the only one to carry water for it? She didn't think of herself as stupid, and yet, how come she hadn't seen this coming? “Get off,” she said.