Rules for Becoming a Legend (29 page)

“Yes, Dex's doing well,” Genny said quietly, already sensing trouble.

“People are saying that with Dex in the middle, the Fishermen are hard to beat.” His words came as though from memory and Genny thought she may have read them in the
Columbia City Standard
. He put a hand on the back of a chair, and then, finding it awkward, put it in his pocket. Then back to the chair. “Now if Jimmy can find his touch again, you could have an exceptional team.”

“You seem to know your basketball, Doctor,” Nurse Larry said in that suggestive lilt he saved for stuffy men and women he wasn't interested in.

McMahan didn't pick up on the sarcastic tone. He let out an expansive sigh. “Well I played a little when I was younger. I was fortunate enough to get the Country Christian Cougars into the playoffs one year.”

“I think I
remember
that year.” Genny Mori chimed in. “We bumped you didn't we? I mean Todd and his friends.”

McMahan cocked his head. “How
is
the delivery-man business these days?” he asked.

Genny Mori stared at him in disbelief. There was a big bulging vein on his neck. She felt the other nurses watching them, sensing a bruised spot between her and McMahan. They were uncomfortable. There would be gossip over what the tension between Doctor
McMahan and Nurse Kirkus
really
meant later, she knew. One by one the nurses made their exits, Nurse Larry last.

“You two
play nice
now,” he said.

•   •   •

It hadn't gone well. He'd snapped at her. Nobody could get him to a boil the way Genny Kirkus could. He was sorry for what he'd just said. He leaned in and whispered, the bigness of his news rounding out the words with hope. “Have a drink with me tonight.”

“No.” Genny folded her arms.

“It's just a drink. There's something I want to talk about.”

“Go jump off a cliff. You want to talk? You just want to screw.” She stood and stalked off into the cafeteria crowd.

He caught up to her, pulled her arm, people looking, but finally he didn't care. “I want to be with you, OK? I don't care about anything else.” Genny's eyes cut to those around them, everyone staring. “I'll give you a ride to the game. We can talk.”

She looked at him. He knew how she loved his eyes. He didn't dare blink. Then she looked down, and he saw through the part in her hair how her skin was turning red. Warmth. He'd got to her.

“Yeah, I do.” She looked up at him, blushing, but steely too. “We can watch together, side by side. What do you think?”

She meant to test him. He swallowed, eyes breaking to the floor and then back to her face. “Yes, OK, sounds fun.”

•   •   •

Meanwhile, Todd was hearing the same hype about Dex at the Van Eyck Pepsi Plant. The night of the game he was paired with Ray Atto.

“So, Mr. Kirkus, big game tonight,” Ray said as they loaded up the truck.

“Sure is.”

“Too bad Jimmy quit playing.” Todd gave him an eye, but Ray stammered on. “Well, you never know with slumps. Alls I'm
saying.” Ray rubbed his fingers together: a little tic that drove Todd nuts. It came whenever the kid tried to quit smoking.

Todd sighed, tried to change the subject. “So your girlfriend's pregnant again?”

“Oh she wasn't pregnant before, or the time before that. If you remember. She just thought she was. Now, I guess she says it's for real. She's all mowing down on these dill chips all the time 'cause they're the craving.”

“Better kick smoking then. For real.”

“Sure, I know. I have. Flushed all my cigarettes last week. It's been a bitch. My fingers keep moving like they think there's a smoke.” He set down a crate and looked at his hand. “Hey, you think Dex got a chance to be as good as me. Or you?”

“He'll be better than one of us, that's for sure.”

Ray hummed while he thought it over. “You got recruited from everywhere. I heard Oregon, UCLA. So you
got
to know if Dex will make it.”

“Ray.”

“But if you had to guess if he got what it takes. I mean, Jimmy, he started for a while, you know, until the pressure got up.”

“Drop it, Ray,” Mr. Kirkus growled. “It takes one bum friend and one bum knee is all it takes.”

They loaded the rest of the product in silence. Todd hated to admit it, but he
was
feeling nervous about the game. Ever since Jimmy's meltdown against Seaside last year—and his own drunken scene that followed—he had an ominous feeling in his gut that there were still more hits to come. He was actually glad he had to work and couldn't be there.

“Easy, OK, I get it,” Ray said, all forced cheer.

Todd put his energy into ignoring Ray. He stiffened his face, didn't say a word. Todd was a guy who could use silence like the blunt end of a bat.

Their boss, Ronnie O'Rourke, walked by. “You two ladies in a spat?”

Todd didn't laugh so Ronnie scuttled off.

Todd kept it silent all through the drive out to Warrington where they were setting up a new display at Fred Meyer after store hours. They didn't say a word as they loaded up the hand trucks. In the parking lot, the fog hung so low it felt like they were dipping their heads into a sky-bound pool. Everything was beaded wetness. Ray fell into a coughing fit and the sound was huge, long-legged, as it ran off under white cover.

Later, while Todd and Ray were setting up the new display, they listened to the game on a little battery-powered radio. Todd was surprised to hear Jimmy was in the lineup. He thought the kid wasn't even on the team.
Nobody tells me anything
. He cracked a beer. Ray looked around, chuckled, opened his own.

As they listened to the game, Ray knew enough to keep his mouth shut and Todd was happy he did. They were in a deserted store where anything could happen if he lost his temper. Finally, when the last buzzer sounded, Ray opened his mouth, and Todd was happy he did that too.

“Your boys did pretty good, Mr. Kirkus,” he said.

“Ray, you got no idea.”

•   •   •

Genny Mori and McMahan enjoyed a ripe silence on the way to the game. It had been a while since they had been like this: alone, embarking on something together. There was a giddiness to it that reminded her of when things between them were just starting. She'd do it right this time, though. No sneaking around. If he wanted her back, then take her all the way. They could get a place together in Seaside. Jimmy and Dex would come live there half the time. With the Doc's salary, they could afford a house on the beach. A big house. Glass windows, reclaimed wooden furniture.
She envisioned a hot tub in the back, running through the cold rain with him to that steamy, bubbly water. Any day could be like that.

“This is nice,” he said. Through the skylight in his rich man's car, an early moon lit up his face. Glowed.

“Yes,” she said, and resisted holding his hand. “It is.”

They watched the game side by side four bleachers up from the court. The gym so jam-packed their sides touched from ankle to shoulder. Genny remembered it was one of the things she preferred about McMahan. In the tortuous months she'd spent apart from him, she'd almost forgotten this. How she felt she measured up against him. Never tiny or eclipsed. They shared an excitement at being forced into such tight physical contact in a public place.

“Need more room, Genny?” McMahan asked. What he really was asking was
Can we again?

“No, I'm OK,” she shouted over the pandemonium.
Let's try, for real this time
. She ran her eyes from his feet all the way up to his shoulders and then into his eyes.

Genny felt the heat pulsing from him. Funny how her man who was supposed to make millions in the NBA was barely paying bills stacking cans of Pepsi while little Doc McMahan, who couldn't get his team out of the first round of the Oregon High School playoffs, owned a yacht. That was life for Genny though: a slippery thing. Being with him here felt like her orbit was tied to his gravity. It was a thing she remembered about her and Todd when they were first starting out. Up until Suzie died, really. Focused so tightly onto one another that their own world came to seem so big it was hard to believe anything else existed. A complete tipping into that she hadn't come out of for so long. So close to one another that it was hard to tell when they were being ridiculous, hard to know when Todd was taking it too far, holding
on too long. Slowly though, with an inevitable force, Todd pushed her out.

And here was that world-expanding feeling with McMahan. She hadn't realized how much she missed it.

•   •   •

That Seaside game would prove to be both the first and last time the Kirkus boys played together in high school. The Gulls came ready. With all the hype surrounding Dex, and the history of Jimmy's meltdown the previous year, Shooter Ackley and his team had long had the game circled on the calendar. Shooter was loose, confident; the Gulls' fans rowdy. When Jimmy unexpectedly walked in for warm-ups—everyone had heard he
wasn't
on the team this year—Seaside's chants almost immediately shifted to the old classic.

“
Dad-dy's bet-ter!
”

“
Dad-dy's bet-ter!
”

“
Dad-dy's bet-ter!
”

Industrious lowerclassmen boys ran among the crowd selling Krispy Kreme donuts they'd driven in from outside Portland for three dollars apiece. People high on the sense that something important was
finally
happening in their area, laughed louder than normal, touched longer than usual, and lingered in bathroom doorways and on every step back up to their spot in the bleachers, hoping to get caught in conversation with someone, anyone. Everyone was an expert. The band played loud, sloppy versions of “We Will Rock You”—focusing more on their choreographed trumpet swings than on the actual notes they hit—while the crowd stamped the popcorn-crunch ground in appreciation.
Boom, boom, clap.
Wading perilously through the crowd an overweight woman wearing a Seaside basketball jersey with “Trevor's Mom” stitched on the back sold raffle tickets to the fifty-fifty drawing at halftime. Some lucky bum would leave the gym with
more than $200 extra in his pocket for the investment of a dollar. Then he'd either get famously drunk with his pals, or buy a new spray-in liner for the bed of his pickup.

It was the kind of atmosphere the Flying Finn would have thrived in. Running around the gym, shaking his hips to the pep-band music, inviting and flinging back taunts. He wasn't there, though. He was home, listening on the radio, nobody willing to give him a ride to the game.

Super Berg was there, though. Wife Mary at his side. Eating popcorn and open-mouth laughing at whatever the guy next to him was saying. He was in his greasy element.

Out on the floor, our kid Jimmy felt all kinds of butterflies in his belly. No, forget butterflies. Try locust. Sound packed tight.

“Don't worry about it,” Dex shouted to him, “Just a game. Don't mean much.”

“OK, Dex.”

Neither of them believed it, but it was still nice to hear.

“Besides, that kid,” Dex pointed at Shooter Ackley in the layup line, legs so muscular his shorts seemed a few sizes small, “he's more worried about showing off those pretty legs than playing ball. Look at him wiggle his butt around!”

Jimmy chuckled. “His mom dry them on high?” The brothers laughed.

Then Dex stopped, serious. “I'll put Shooter in his place, you just shoot like Tapiola.”

“OK, put your money where your mouth is. I bet Shooter shuts you down.”

“I'll never put my money where my mouth is,” Dex said, falling into his old joke. “Don't you know where money's been?”

“It's filthy.”

And the brothers laughed some more, and it felt good. Felt like they were all the way back.

“Look at that guy,” Dex said. He pointed to Pedro in the stands, so high his face looked like unfired clay, melting off his head.

“Hey you guuuuys!” Pedro shouted in an impersonation of Chunk from
The Goonies
.

“He really should get involved with DARE,” Jimmy said.

“
Càllate, idiota
!” Dex yelled wildly.

Dex was a bit shorter than Shooter, but a lot wider. Plus Dex had a chip on his shoulder the size of Oregon and most other western states combined. He hated Shooter more than he thought it possible to hate someone. It scared and electrified him, took his body over like when he socked Joe Looney.

Jimmy started the game on the bench and Seaside went up early. While Dex had a pretty good handle on Shooter, the rest of Seaside's team got wide open looks and knocked them down. Dex needed outside scoring help. Stretch the floor. Couldn't do it all on his own.

Each time Dex ran up the court, he shouted to Coach Kelly, “Put Jimmy in!”

Finally, start of the third quarter and Seaside up by fifteen, Coach Kelly called for Jimmy. Our kid retied the drawstring on his shorts, stomped his feet twice, and checked in. Seaside's fans went berserk. Chants of “
Dad-dy's bet-ter!
”
rained down. The whistle blew. Jimmy got the inbounds pass. First few dribbles were shaky, he had to look at the ball instead of up the court. Everyone in the stands held their breath. The Seagulls player guarding Jimmy went for a swipe. Instincts set in, Jimmy dribbled through his legs and spun around. So smooth and tricky the defender was suddenly behind our kid, confused, disoriented.

“Oh, now!” Dex yelled.

The Seaside crowd cooed, confused.

Shooter Ackley came off Dex to pick up Jimmy. A caught crab, snapping his claws, eager to take off the first finger he got hold of.
The crowd regained their lungs, sputtered, then full-out. Cheering, jeering, and shouting ensued. Jimmy saw Shooter running at him. The other game flashed in his mind. All the taunts came back fresh as the day they happened. “Your baby bro's bigger than you.” BRICK. “Your Grandpa sleeps on the streets, crazy fuck.” WHIFF. “Your daddy was better than you'll ever be.” AIR BALL
.
His whole life had locked up after that game. The pressure. It was happening again. He could feel his joints calcifying.