The Moves Make the Man (4 page)

You cut through the backyards first, all of them no problem except Mrs. Stokes who worries about her tomatoes and thinks every boy in town lies awake plotting how to steal them. You get to hop three fences. Then you come to town but you don't go in, cutting instead down Left Alley which even though it is dark is no trouble, because all the store owners keep their back doors open and could hear if anybody jumped you. At the end of the alley you have to pop over a high fence and if you are wearing a stretchy shirt or too big for you like one of Maurice's sweat shirts from the high school track team, then you can stick the ball up under while you jump.

You cut across Marsh Fields then and pretty soon you stop seeing streets and only trees are there, growing out of the mucky ground. You stop seeing people too, especially in the summer on account of the bugs.

So you head right into the forest, or maybe it is just woods, even though there does not seem to be a path. You know where to go. And pretty soon, just when you think the woods are going to get even darker and moister and cooler, you step right out into the clearing and see it.

The prettiest little concrete half-court basketball place in town.

The trees are high enough to cut the sun out and the shade keeps it cool enough that most of the bugs shy off. Still, it is bright in there, kind of a greenish blue light, looking just like the way hemlocks smell. The only sound you hear, except for the squeak of your Chucks and the bammata of the ball and the pong of the steel backboard and the ching of the nets, is whistles from birds in the forest. There is one old hawk who sits on a red pine branch on the edge of the clearing and watches sometimes, but he never makes any noise. Mostly it is smaller birds inside. One time the hawk got himself a squirrel that came out to see what was making the bammata. I suppose he waits in case another one is stupid enough to try it again.

You can have this court anytime by yourself. Nobody knows it is there. Nobody is interested in playing basketball in the summer, anyway. You have to wonder whose idea it was to build a basketball court out in the middle of the forest behind Marsh Fields. It may not seem like a good idea because the court is not crowded, but when you play there, smelling those hemlocks as you spin through the cool air and popping those jumpers facing any direction without sun in your eyes, and always finding it all to your own game, then you think it is a very great idea indeed. You think this court was built by somebody who loved the game you love, and you think he was a genius, like you.

You can play in the winter too. The trees are still green and the air is not too cold. The hawk is gone in the winter, but you don't miss him much.

That court in the woods was where I spent last summer. Every day after breakfast I cut on out there, taking a canteen full of Hi C and my ball and sometimes a banana sandwich or something though mostly it was too hot to eat. I played all morning until it got about to noon, the only time the sun got bad in my court. Then I would lie down in the pine shade and sip a little C and maybe stack a z or two. I would wake up feeling cool and crisp and full of speed, so I hit the court again until evening time.

I was always by myself. Well, almost always, and the one time I was not was enough to make sure I never brought anybody along ever again. I did not want to bring anybody even then, but I ran into Poke Peters in Left Alley, sitting out behind his father's grocery, drinking a Dr. Pepper with M&Ms in it and singing In the jungle the mighty jungle the lion screws tonight. That song happened to be about my favorite last summer and I thought Poke was stupid and nasty to mess it into some silly dirtiness, and I told him so.

He ignored me and squinted underneath his baseball cap
which was a fake Durham Bulls, with the front D peeling off. Play some catch with me, he said.

No, I said, and made to move off.

Okay, play some roll-a-bat.

Forget it, I said. Roll-a-bat is the dumbest thing anybody ever thought of to kill time, and although I did not tell Poke, I would rather have run a mile in last year's sneaks than do it. What it is, you hit the ball as hard as you can to a person out in the field and he catches it and from where he stands he slings the ball along the ground and tries to bop the bat, which you have laid on the ground where you hit from. If he hits it he gets to bat and you got to go catch and roll. Typical sort of jive for a baseball lover to think up.

Poke took a pull at his drink, getting all the M&Ms, but then he sort of thought of me and politely spit a few back in and offered me a swig. I shook my head. He said, Where you headed, then?

I was carrying a basketball so it was a pretty stupid question, but I also could not say I was going swimming or anything like that, though I would have because everybody knows Poke hates to swim or even bathe.

Going to shoot around some, I said.

Poke polished off the Dr. Pepper with a slurp, threw the bottle straight up over his head and smiled at me right in the eyes while it crashed on the roof.

James Knox Polk Peters Jr. you get your young black butt in here right now where I can beat it blue! screamed Poke's daddy's voice from back inside the store. Poke kept smiling but hopped off the crate and said, Let's us go do some hoop.

Now, only somebody who doesn't know anything will call hoops hoop without the s on the end. It is just like when you meet someone from the North and they want to pretend
to talk southern as a joke and they say you-all to only one person. No southerner ever said you-all to only just one person, it being the very word to use for more than one, obviously. Don't ask me why hoops is hoops and not hoop, but it is. Poke and other baseball people are liable to this mistake. It shows how little they know.

But Poke was determined to come and play. My manners are too good to tell somebody being friendly that they are about as welcome as the whooping cough, so I let him tag. All the while we walked I was afraid he was going to like my court so much he would come back and bring his jive friends, but this was not so. He got bored with walking real soon, and did not pay attention well enough to remember how to get there. Also he kept moaning about the bugs and about how I must be crazy and hate people to go so far out of town to do a little hoop. When we got to the woods he even stopped and looked at me with one eye closed and a suspicious frown.

You trying to trick me, nigger?

No, Poke, I said. But if you don't want to come…

You trying to get me to come swimming in some nasty creek in these woods?

No creek in these woods, I said, wishing there was one and we had to swim across it two miles underwater.

He cocked his head up, still one eye closed, and sniffed the air. No, he said, I believe you telling the truth. I can smell swimming water if it's nearabouts, and I don't smell a thing now. He sniffed again, and I think he inhaled a mosquito for he fell to coughing and whining something awful. Finally we got through the woods and out to the court.

What happened for the rest of the morning was too awful to tell all of. First, Poke wanted to stand me one on one,
but I scored six straight buckets and ran him so bad he started hacking and drooling and moaning until he had to sit in the shade and smoke a cigarette, which stank everything up and made ME start to hack. Then he came back and insisted that we play HORSE. I hit three jumpers and he missed but then I missed a left-handed lay-up and he took the ball and stood behind the backboard with his back to it, and while I watched amazed and scornful, for who would ever use such a shot, he bounced the ball backwards between his legs and it bounced off the pole, hit the back of his head which he held rigid, sailed up over the board and dropped through the net.

Make it, sucker, he said.

That is not a shot, I said. Only a fool would call that a shot.

Make it, he said.

I bounced it off my foot off to the edge of the woods.

Eat yourself an H, baby, said Poke.

Then he lay down on the foul line with his head pointed toward the basket, on his back with his feet in the air. He tossed the ball onto his feet and snapped his ankles up, rolling the ball off his toes into the air about a foot and a half. While it was in the air he tucked his legs back and when it came down he snapped them back and kicked the ball backwards over his head. It hit the board so hard the whole pole shook, but the ball shot through the net.

Do it to it, he said. Let's see how much hoop class you got.

That kind of thing doesn't measure basketball ability, I started to say, but he shook his head and said Poo poo poo, nigger. Make it go, or you got O.

I didn't even toss the ball up onto my feet right, and that was it.

He missed his next one, some shot off his rear end while doing the shingaling to the song Do You Love Me, which he sang in a high voice. I hit two jumpers and closed out the game, and we left, but I was shaking. Poke was happy, singing and giving me grief about his shots I didn't make and ripping pine needles off trees to suck on and picking up pine cones to whip at trees with a windup he thought looked like Mudcat Grant's. I was not happy. I felt like I had wasted a day, wasted more than that too—wasted my whole private thing. Being alone in a place is one of those things you can only have for one long spell, and when you break it you are never the same quite again, you cannot get it back exactly right.

But Poke never troubled me again to come back, and he forgot all about my court I am sure, and I never let myself get anywhere near anybody on my way to play that summer again. After a couple of weeks, I did have my private thing back, and it felt exactly right, though I later found it wasn't, though I do not think Poke's intruding had anything to do with the weirdness I grew.

My momma was the first person to notice, and the only person to notice, except for me, which I did after she tuned me in on it. I had no idea I was doing anything funny. Every day I slipped off with my ball and every evening I came home, and in between, there were my moves. Moves were all I cared about last summer. I got them down, and I liked not just the fun of doing them, but having them too, like a little definition of Jerome. Reverse spin, triple pump, reverse dribble, stutter step with twist to the left, stutter into jumper, blind pass. These are me. The moves make the man, the moves make me, I thought, until Momma noticed they were making me something else.

One nice thing about my momma is, she never gets on you for what you are not doing. I mean, she never looks away from the things you do only to notice what isn't on the plan. This is the most important thing in getting along with your son, or getting along with anybody, and I can tell you because I copy it from her and it makes good sense. You don't go looking at the things people don't do, when they already be doing plenty in other areas. If your son collects
stamps, why you want to go fussing at him because he doesn't play the clarinet? Check out his stamps, man.

Maurice used to nail me for all kinds of things I did not do, complaining that I was going to get unrounded and all off balance unless I developed this or that side of myself and stopped being content. He picked things up from his studies, books that said the normal kid was supposed to play at least three sports a year with equal enthusiasm, split his love equally between two parents, like science as much as English and music as much as gym, have white friends and Negro friends and Chinese friends and all kinds of people we probably don't even have in Wilmington anyway. I was wrong on all counts according to Mo, but most of the counts I couldn't help. For example, my father got killed when I was hardly even born, hit by a truck and knocked into many pieces according to my cousin Terry who is eight years older than me and saw things. Now, I couldn't go loving him, could I, when I never heard a word from the dude? My momma was too much to count as just one parent, anyway, and nobody could go off balance loving her. I had to keep quick and keen to keep up with loving all the things she was. Maurice would have said so too, if he thought about it that way.

As for liking all subjects the same, I only knew one person who did that and he was this kid named Hutchins who got nothing but C's right down the line, smiling all the while and doing his homework half right and half wrong no matter what the class. What a goof. He reminded me of the black Little League, every team the same record, same number of wins and losses, all tied up. Look, every kid I know likes some things better, some going for chocolate milk which makes me throw up personally, some going for Seven-Up, and me liking nothing as much as cold blue water. Every kid
has his favorite drink, his favorite subject, most even have his favorite parent.

So Maurice made noise and tried to get me to play with his old chemistry set instead of reading, with its old caked-up flasks and cracked test tubes so you'd be lucky not to explode yourself, and things like that. My momma finally told him to leave me be. She knew I was all right and not about to get into any bad ways, all on my own. Some kids you can trust, and that's me.

Even so, last summer my momma even asked me a couple of times if I was playing with anybody or if I was okay. I was doing the solo hoops thing a little more than ever. She also said I was starting to talk to myself even when other people were there. This shook me up a little bit. I asked what she heard me say. She said she could never tell, sounded like code. So next time I was out shooting I suddenly tuned in, and sure enough I was just chattering away, a twist above a whisper, and what I was saying was, what my imaginary opponent in one on one was seeing—all my moves like a catalogue. I was naming them off and telling him what they were doing to him, you know: Here I go baby reverse spin up for double pump off the glass you got them legs crossed and eyes too SWISH! Stuff like that, for almost every shot.

Whew! I never used to talk to myself like that. Oh, once in a while I would imagine a game, but never one on one, always big team things under the lights in Boston Garden, like any kid. I hear the baseball dudes pretending they are batting against Whitey Ford all the time. But I only did this once a week or so. Rest of the time, I was always just concentrating on my moves, how every part of me felt when I left the ground or let it fly or came down too early off a spin. I never needed to pretend anything. I never needed to
imagine I was going against somebody. I never needed anything but my own self making my own game, and it didn't feel selfish or anything stupid and lonely, because I was not retreating or being shy. I was just playing and concentrating on the thing right there, right then. So how come all of a sudden I am dreaming up some bad dude to beat?

The next thing to look at was the funny feeling I had, that my mystery opponent was not just any old mystery opponent. I had a little twiggle inside that told me I knew him. Maybe not just as he was on that court in my head, but that I had made him out of somebody. So I just kept on playing with him, but watching now, trying to let myself go on with this weird jive but keeping an eye on what I might let slip. (This watching and being natural is a pain, and I will never do it again, I can tell you.) Sure enough, though, one day I flashed a behind-the-back dribble at my enemy and slipped by to the inside and rolled it off my left hand on the reverse and it was just so humiliating and nasty that I was screaming inside and the screams were all for his shame and helplessness and they were so pointed at him that I could not miss him there:

You guessed it. My opponent in my head was that white shortstop.

Man! What a foolish thing! I just stood there, the ball bouncing itself out after coming through the cords, and I thought, What kind of weirdo have I become? Here I am playing for the hate of somebody I don't know and saw once and when I saw him all he was was beautiful, and I don't even notice when I have built him up for something and tear him down every day instead of playing sharp and simple. I am not usually a kid who slips into bad habits. I know what I am doing every step—that's why I do it, because I am sure
it is good. So for this thing to sneak up on me…

I cut out this mystery enemy business for the next two weeks, the last two of the summer. No white shortstop Bix boy secret ghost loser taking all my fakes and giving me the left side. I kept an eye on myself and there was not a single word of whispered jive.

But you know what? I had no fun. And worse, during those two weeks, I didn't have my moves, not even the moves I had built up over all those years before I had to lay them on a ghost.

I was pretty worried. But then this thing with the school started, and took my mind right off the problem. At least for a while.