Rules for Becoming a Legend (26 page)

Todd turned. He called up the driveway. “I'll be better to James. And you be better to Jimmy.” He looked down, examining the
knuckles of the fist he'd just used to punch Super Berg's door frame, smiling. “You know on Jimmy's birth certificate, it says James. He's named James. I named him for my best friend. Because listen. Even though my whole basketball life ended that night, I didn't drive. I didn't crash, I didn't die, or worse yet kill someone. After losing Suzie, after knowing what that's like, I couldn't have lived with myself if I'd driven that night and hurt someone. I've been alive these years to meet my three beautiful children all because of James.”

Todd got in that old van that vibrated so much while running it could burst at the seams. He knew he'd gotten to Super Berg. Jimmy, his son, would be allowed to play. He peeled off.

Summer, 2005

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

B
eing at home all day was simply unbearable. Jimmy couldn't be sure, as he hadn't talked with him since the fight with Pedro, but he was fairly certain Dex hated him. His little—
big
—brother acted like he didn't exist and every chance he got, he ran off with Pedro. Left a hole Jimmy was too proud to just point-blank ask about. Like
You sided with him over me?
Meanwhile, the Flying Finn spent June going on incessantly about calories, hydration, and training for his senior cycling circuit; his mom was always in the process of just leaving or just coming home; and his pops was increasingly becoming a drunk poltergeist banging around the house, always knocking something over in the next room, denying he'd done it, shouting stupid things like “WE'LL SHOW THEM,” an embarrassment.

So Jimmy needed out. He needed to get out of the house, but away from the basketball courts. Couldn't be Jimmy Kirkus, didn't want to be Jimmy Soft. He saw a help-wanted ad in the
Columbia City Standard
. Phrases like “Must be able to lift forty pounds” and “Large amounts of lawn maintenance” appealed to him. He imagined himself with a bunch of guys, drinking pop after mowing fields. All of them laughing at some joke, the same joke, together, the setting summer sun alighting on their shoulders. Nudging each other with their elbows. Iconic. He applied for a job working
the seasonal crew for the school district under Mr. Berg. Berg didn't even call him in for an interview. He was hired.

The reality of the work was a bit different from what he'd imagined. Each morning he and a crew of middle-aged men and one college-aged guy home for the summer met Mr. Berg in a small room at the back of the high school to be assigned their tasks for the day. While they waited for Berg to show up the old guys traded stories of hot girls. Who fucked who where and how. Who saw who sucking who and when. Stuff that always started with “Hey, I probably shouldn't be saying this but,” and ended with “And I was like damn!”
Jimmy started to tell his own story about Naomi once, but stopped halfway through when he noticed how quiet the room got. Wouldn't go on no matter how the men pressed. So they filled in the blanks for him and he felt disgusting. After that it was all elbows to the side and “Jimmy knows what I'm saying.” He was better than all these men. Fucking go-nowhere townies.

Then Berg would come in and everyone stopped talking. He ticked off their tasks for the day. Weed-whacking, waxing the floors, moving furniture, replacing the high-up florescent bulbs using hydraulic lifts, and on and on. And then they were all out, split up into small teams. The crew worked so hard, Jimmy didn't have strength for much else—and that's exactly how he wanted it. Work all day just to come home and sleep.

He got home the same time each day, dirty and tired, smelling of cut grass and gasoline, and went into his bedroom to lay face down and sweat through long naps with his windows shut. He'd wake up hours later, starving, when the rest of the house was asleep or gone, and eat cold soup straight from the can in a dark kitchen. Alive just enough to be hungry. Mind for once not thinking about his disintegrating life, just pleasantly fuzzy with sleep. He enjoyed the animalness of it.

Still, no matter how hard he threw himself into work, there were some nights when he woke up for food and found himself giving in. He took his basketball, still scribbled all over with the names of his childhood idols, and walked down to Tapiola Courts to shoot under the weak light. It was surreal how he was pulled to the courts. Almost as if his body were a vehicle and he were only along for the ride. He wondered how, even when he was too tired for anything else, he could still do the dribble, dribble, shoot. He felt guilty about it and worried for some reason that he might be seen. With the wind coming in quick off the river to sweep the cement, he'd shiver and look around. A vague fear singeing the edges. He was distrustful of Youngs River, only an outlet pass away, like at any moment it might rise up. It'd happened in the past. It would happen again. The blackness just past the edges of his peripheral vision suspect too. Sometimes he swore there was something scuttling close to the ground. A fucking sand toad. He could turn as quick as he wanted, and still see nothing.

And yet it was all worth it because on a few nights, alone, he was his old basketball self. Teeing off from all over the court, our kid Jimmy was vintage. A throwback to when everyone, including Jimmy, thought he was truly special. And it felt
good
. Good like his kid brother still adored him, like he still had his best friend, like roundball could still save and the haters didn't know what they were talking about. Then he'd go home, sick and giddy with hope, only to fall asleep and wake back up in the world where he was still
Jimmy Soft
, still a basketball bust.

Then, alarm blaring, he'd hump it to another day of work.

•   •   •

That summer, Pedro got a good weed connect from a guy he met online named Smokey Bear. He started hanging with some older kids, smoking cigarettes, chugging beer. Watch
Star Wars
with the rule that every time Luke whined, you had to shotgun a Miller.
Drunk as a skunk before young Skywalker killed his first storm trooper. Wake up feeling sick with a need for life, spend an hour or two with his brother's box of girlie magazines in the downstairs bathroom. Finally come out for breakfast feeling weak and disgusting. Roll one up. Get high. Do up a couple more for the road, for his friends, meet with the new crew he played tagalong with. Fuck Jimmy. Fuck basketball. He wanted to get laid. Or get high. Mostly get laid while high.

Kids all around him had these stupid dreams. Stuff like wanting to be a music producer, a fashion designer, a business owner, but Pedro was the only one who knew the secret. All those people wanted those things so they'd have the money and time to chill out, relax, drink high-end scotch, and smoke tight, illegally imported cigars. He had a better idea. He'd just do it now. His dream was to have no dreams and unexpectedly, without Sunshine Jimmy and his ridiculous basketball hopes, he felt relaxed. Sad too, but he liked to linger on the relaxed part.

Jimmy could be a real pain. He was always on about basketball. Like, did you see the Vince Carter jam from last night? No, no I did not, because we're not twelve anymore and there's bigger things in this world than hoops. Hoops leaving Jimmy served him right. Still, a part of Pedro felt for our kid. Jimmy with no basketball skills was like Taco Bell fajitas—shit just seemed fake.

Sometimes when he sat at the top of Columbia City Column Hill with the other stoners, Pedro felt like his shortcut-to-happiness plan was really panning out. From his perch overlooking the entire town, pretending he was flying while he was flying, Pedro could really feel his body getting lighter, fast approaching the moment when it was light enough to take off. Made him smile, mouth the word “adios.”

He tried to hang with Dex, but as the summer progressed this became more infrequent. Dex started running with kids too cool for Pedro and the stoner burnouts he'd glommed on to. Kids under
the influence of being good-looking, talented, or rich—or some combination of all three. When Dex and Pedro did see each other, they bitched about Jimmy, complained about him acting like a little girl, remembered those times when he promised he'd ride the booster bus with them, but ditched last second.

More and more though, Dex was separating from Pedro too—becoming his own force.

•   •   •

For Dex, it had been a punch in the gut to hear of Pedro and Jimmy's fight. Much of his world to that point had been those two. And while it pained him, he would have taken Jimmy's side, no doubt. Problem was, Jimmy just stopped talking to him after the fight. So he waited, scared his big bro was mad at him for some reason. Then Jimmy just kept silent like Dex was at fault in it too, and that scared feeling went sour in his belly, way past the expiration date, until he was pissed off. Then when summer really got going hot and bothered, he jumped on for the ride.

Finally away from Jimmy's pressure to play roundball twenty-four hours a day, Dex more fully inhabited his own personality. He ran with gangs of summerland kids, doing normal teenage stuff. A summer glued together with bubble gum and ripped to shreds by bottle rockets. He liked it, to be honest, just being normal. He got lit with Pedro and learned Spanish slang. Toilet-papered houses and shoplifted beer. Once spent an entire day sun burning “Fuck Off” onto his chest, only the third
f
didn't really take. He ran around with “Fuck Of” instead. He and his friends turning it into a joke, an adjective. “You want a little
fuck of
me? Now that's a
fuck of
a movie.” He went to bonfire parties on the beach and touched the sweaty, pebble-hard nipples of three different girls, felt their tongues mix him up with his mouth as the cauldron, had their hair in his eyes as the wind played interference.

Sometimes Dex, on bored nights, went down to the courts in
secret and watched his big brother from the shadows. Sipped tallboys he stole from pops and saw Jimmy just like he used to be. Smooth, fluid, and special. Here at Tapiola, it all looked so easy. Almost made it seem like Jimmy had choked on purpose. Dex watched, chucked the empty beer cans behind him, felt the blood pound in his temples.

•   •   •

With fall football coming on fast and the town getting ready for back to school, Jimmy and Mr. Berg were having lunch in the stands that overlooked the half-mown football field.

“Your Dad was like Dex, you know, all big and strong,” Berg said between mouthfuls of peanut butter and banana sandwich. “Holy cow. But he could shoot a little too. Nowhere near what you can do, but he could shoot a little.”

Their pants were stained green where the mower had kicked up the juicy bits. Spackles of half-digested plant stuck in their hair and on their faces. The almost tart smell of cut grass hung in the air. Jimmy picked a disfigured leaf off his forearm. “Wasn't small like me, huh?” he said.

“Wasn't
quick
like you.” Berg patted our kid's arm. Jimmy flinched and Berg pulled his hand away. “Hey, he wasn't quick, what I say? And he couldn't light it up like you can. Jeez Louise, forget about it. All those chants about Daddy's better, all that stuff? That's ignorance right there, 'cause you're just as special as him.”

“Wish I could do it in a real game,” Jimmy said.

“You will, you will. You're special, just like your daddy. I remember my father pestering me about how come I wasn't stepping up, making more plays, and I'd tell him, ‘Hey Dad, when you got Freight Train on your team, you feed him the ball. You don't go around putting paint on the Mona Lisa and you don't play a game of basketball with Todd Kirkus and
not
give him the damn ball. Plain and simple.'” Mr. Berg laughed. “Here's the thing, though,
Jimmy. If your dad was the Mona Lisa, then you're the whole museum. You got all the keys to be great, I'm telling you.”

A black sedan pulled into the parking lot. They quit their conversation to watch. The car stopped and shook slightly. Mr. Berg started talking again but the tone of his voice shifted. The words were decapitated by his breath. The door to the black sedan opened with that precise sort of quiet pop that only comes from very expensive cars. Out stepped Principal Berg—recently promoted to superintendent—in tan shorts and a loose button-up shirt. The promotion had taken his shoddy internal spring, ground down with old age, and put the bounce back in it. Jimmy had heard all the rumors. How Super Berg used the bump in salary to fuel a “midlife” crisis—coming full three quarters of the way into his life. He'd divorced his second and married his third wife, bought expensive toys, and took to wearing his silk shirts unbuttoned a few too many. He carried most of the change flabbily in his belly.

Super Berg shaded his eyes as he turned slow circles in the parking lot, trying to spot them. Jimmy looked at Mr. Berg. The man made no attempt to get his father's attention. His jaw clenched tightly. The talking stopped.

When Super
Berg finally spotted them seated high up in the bleachers, he whistled shrilly and motioned with big sweeps of his arm that they, or rather just Mr. Berg, should come down. Raising his arms like that caused the bottom of his shirt to ride up and expose his hair-peppered paunch. A pale slug.

Mr. Berg stared straight ahead, not talking, not waving back.

Finally Super Berg threw his arms up in an exaggerated shrug and started the climb up the bleacher seats. As he got closer, Jimmy noticed he was wearing a pair of yellow-lens sunglasses. Round things like a rock star could maybe pull off. Guy like Super Berg though, he just looked goofy. Too old to pull it off.

“Hey,” Mr. Berg said to Jimmy, the trouble palpable in the air. “Why don't you go get started on chalking the end zones, I'll be down in a second.”

Jimmy, sore and curious, moved slowly. “OK.”

“Hurry up now,” Mr. Berg warned.

Super Berg was close, huffing. “Make. Me. Climb. Your father. Of all. The.”

Jimmy could see the rage building red in his pudgy face.

“Wait a second,” Super Berg called.

Jimmy's stomach tingled. “Me?” Super Berg had come to each and every game of Jimmy's disastrous freshman season, big bucket of popcorn on his knee and Mary, the new wife who said little, at his side. Talking with everyone who passed, fingers getting progressively shinier as the butter built up, until by the final buzzer, there was a yellow tint to everything on him, butter smeared on his cheeks and pant legs. He always asked Jimmy before a game with that crooked, greedy smile, if he was “feeling it tonight.”

“Yeah, you,” Super Berg said.