The Unraveling of Mercy Louis (5 page)

Walking to my next class, I carry my backpack gingerly, the letter snarling at me from inside.

I
NSIDE THE GYM,
the basketball girls are scattered around the six hoops completing their warm-ups. There's Mercy, treating the ball like an outgrowth of her hand as she does ball-handling drills in the far corner, figure eights and spiders and over-and-throughs. Nothing more natural in the world than that girl on a court. Illa takes comfort in Mercy's gift. Since the explosion put Mama in the chair, watching Mercy play has been the only thing that makes Illa feel hopeful. She understands why the town blocks off Tuesday and Friday nights to come to the games. When those forty-seven people died in the refinery blast three years ago, Jesus and God and the Holy Ghost, as well as the other trinity of small-town life—drink and smoke and talk—left people comfortless, so Mercy became the town's beacon. The weekend of the state tournament, hundreds of people caravanned to Austin to see the Black Angel because they knew she would give them an hour when their lives would seem better.

Illa remembers the sense of deflation that pervaded the arena after the Lady Rays lost. An entire town sighing in defeat. That night and over the weeks that followed the loss, there had been an edge to people's voices when they talked about Mercy's shoddy play, words sharpened on a steel of betrayal. Illa worried that someone would stick a for-sale sign in Mercy's yard, so she cruised past the house from time to time, ready to uproot the sign before Mercy saw it. The yard stayed clear, though, likely because people feared Evelia. There was talk she could send a man to hell just by praying on it.

The track and softball and volleyball girls are draped over the gym bleachers. One girl, Callie Loggins, is already applying baby oil to her arms and legs, preparing for an after-school sunbath. Illa can hear them twittering about who's going to hook up over the summer, making plans to go to Crystal Beach and the bayou. On the last day of school, only the basketball team is still required to dress out. Coach Martin keeps them running drills until the very end. Technically they're bending the rules by doing so, but no one confronts Coach with this fact.

From outside, she hears the occasional lament of sirens from the Market Basket lot. The sound always gives Illa gooseflesh because it means that somewhere, the underside of life is revealing itself, a reminder that black luck and bad faith exist. She associates the sound with the refinery explosion and with her father's death, even though the police didn't have their lights on as they pulled into the driveway with the news. When her dad wrecked his car on the beach road, he was blind drunk. Illa was three years old, too young to understand death but old enough to register the absence of her gruff, bearded papa, and to know the noises coming from Mama's bedroom meant
sad.
Mama never spoke about Papa. Her mother took a job at the refinery soon after his death.

Illa blinks against the harsh fluorescence of the gym lights, which creates a checkered pattern behind her eyes. In her knees she feels the rhythm of the pounding basketballs. She loves everything about these practices, even drill sergeant Jodi, even the singular gym musk, heavy on cleaning solvent and stale sweat, with a tinge of concession-stand hot dog. Freshman year, Illa signed up to be manager because she needed a PE credit and it seemed like an easy way to knock it out. But after a few days with the team, practice became the highlight of her day. Not just because her duties allowed her to feel a part of something; she also appreciated the way the girls flew down the court, uninhibited, like when they put on that uniform, they forgot they were mortal girls living in a nothing town.

Illa understands she's just the manager, but she takes pride in her work. She knows that for ordinary people like her, value lies in what she can do for others, so she tries to make herself as useful as possible. She gave Chole Gomez the socks off her feet before a game when Chole forgot hers; when Corinne Wolcott's parents divorced, Illa let Corinne blubber to her in the locker room, leaving shimmering snail-trails of mucus on Illa's black T-shirt. How many hundreds of ankles has Illa wrapped, how many knee braces has she cinched, how many black eyes iced and shin splints stretched? Between looking after Mama and mother-henning the team, Illa has become expert at taking care of other people's needs. If only Mercy needed her the way the other girls did, surely they could become friends. But Mercy is not other girls; she is exceptional, always.

“Stark.” In Coach Martin's mouth, Illa's name is onomatopoetic.

“Yes ma'am?”

“Get the equipment set up. Just because it's the last day of school don't mean we won't go hard.”

“Yes ma'am.”

Coach stares at Illa, caterpillar eyebrows raised. After a beat, she looks away to indicate they've finished their exchange, and Illa scrambles for the equipment room. Three years in and
yes ma'am
represents the sum total of her communication with Coach Martin, who wields her reticence so pointedly that even a mime could walk away from her feeling that he'd said too much. For years, Illa has watched the effect of Coach's broadsword of silence on the fawnlike freshmen girls who stumble onto her court. It usually takes less than a minute for the giggling and side conversations to cease, hacked to bits by Coach's aggressive muteness. Only Mercy has the power to make Coach lighten up, teasing out smiles from a mouth Illa had thought incapable of that expression. Coach and Mercy share a closeness born of respect and mutual need, like a jockey and a champion racehorse.

From the equipment room, Illa snags the camera bag, which she keeps wedged behind the ball cage for safekeeping. Even though the next game isn't till October, Coach wants to run the camera. Punching the button to release the bleachers, Illa clambers into position on the topmost bench, where she scans the lens back and forth over the court, trying to capture every bricked shot, every turnover and botched pass. During the season, the five girls with the fewest errors get to start the next game. Now it's just a little muscle-flexing by Coach before the girls disperse for the summer.

The scoreboard clock runs down, filling the gym with the mechanical grunt of the buzzer; warm-ups are over. Illa clicks the camera on, watching as the ten girls take position for the first drill, a full-court layup series in which each missed shot means running horses at drill's end. Illa rarely follows the ball. Instead, she finds herself drifting into photographer mode, attuning herself to the details of the scene: the ropy muscles in the girls' calves contracting with each explosive step, the decisive flick of a wrist in follow-through as a shot rolls off fingertips. The girls balance so perfectly between control and chaos.

As the video camera records, Illa takes the lens off her Canon and snaps a few quick frames, the rapid click of the shutter satisfying beneath her finger. After school, before the janitor kicks them out of the building, she'll develop the photos in the journalism room and show them to Lennox. He's not a photographer, but as editor of the student newspaper, he has strong opinions on just about everything. Which is okay, because she likes watching his mouth move. When Illa had learned that he and Annie were hanging out, she was surprised and disappointed; she'd always thought he had more imagination than that.

On the sidelines, Coach Thibodeaux paces with a clipboard. While they wait to go on, Jasmine Carter and Melissa Rivera do wall touches to keep loose. In between turns on the court, Annie and Mercy hip-check each other. Mercy drains a three just wide of the elbow, but Coach isn't satisfied.

“Want that shot from the baseline,” she says as the girls reset themselves to try the play again. “Move farther down after Gomez sets the pick.”

On the whistle, the play goes live, and Chole bodies up against Keisha Freeman, the backup point guard who shadows Mercy on defense. Then Mercy does exactly as she's instructed, taking an extra dribble down before pulling up for another three. She floats for a blink before releasing the ball, holding her wrist elegantly in follow-through like a woman waving goodbye to a lover at a train station.

Mercy calls the next play; she knows Coach too well to wait for praise. Mercy's delicate features, pale skin, and ice-pool eyes are more haunting than usual today.
Beauty
is too common a word for what she possesses.
Sublimity. Radiance.
Annie isn't lovely the way Mercy is, but she has the kind of obvious, shellacked prettiness that can carry you far in high school if you're the right amount of bitch.

Annie misses an easy bank shot, and the whistle shrills between Coach Martin's lips; play grinds to a halt.

“Now the time for sloppiness? That what you decide?” Coach, hand on hip, levels her falconine glare at Annie.

Illa holds her breath, waits for Annie's riposte. What Coach Martin does with silence, Annie does with words, carving up students and teachers with slicing quips. With practiced nonchalance, Annie shrugs. To Illa, it seems worse than a verbal response. She feels her body tense. Coach looks to her right, then her left, as if searching for someone to corroborate the sass she's just witnessed. “That what this game means to you, Putnam?” Coach shrugs in snide imitation, exaggerating the movement. This time Annie does nothing, her face statuesque in its cool neutrality.

“Don't have time for this kind of slack attitude,” Coach says, talking through her teeth. It's what she does when she's especially pissed, and Illa finds it more unnerving than a good bellow. “Back to it,” Coach says, turning away from the court in disgust. She shakes her head at Coach Thibodeaux, who's busy scribbling away on the clipboard.

Normally, Coach Martin wouldn't stop play to nag Annie for such a small infraction—if she did, they'd never make it through practice. But everyone's on edge over the Market Basket incident. From the gym you can see the convenience store parking lot, the police cars coming and going, the small crowd of gawkers that has gathered. Everyone is waiting to hear the bad news, whatever it is, and Illa can sense the tension moving outward from Coach Martin's telephone-pole frame, emanating from her stiff dome of brown curls.

Practice ends and Coach Martin calls the girls into a huddle. Illa jumps down from the bleachers and moves toward the tightening circle. This is her favorite part of practice. She presses in behind Mercy's right shoulder. From there, Illa can feel the warmth of the girls' perspiring bodies as they listen to Coach and try to catch their breath. Afterward, there will be the tumult of the locker room, the jokes and noise Illa can imagine belong to her. At the last minute, though, Annie shoves her way between Illa and Mercy so that Illa's hand is no longer connected to the huddle.

“God, would you quit
staring
at her?” Annie says under her breath, not bothering to look at Illa. “Freak.”

Illa draws back, blood flooding her cheeks. Clumsily, she shifts a few bodies over. Coach starts talking, but Illa feels light-headed from embarrassment, the flush spreading, making her ears ring. Annie has it in for Illa, and Illa suspects it has something to do with what happened at a school assembly a few days after the explosion. Back then, Mercy had hugged Illa close and then forced Annie to apologize to her.
For what?
Annie protested.
Dad's the asshole, not me.
But Mercy insisted, saying that
someone
ought to say sorry to
somebody.
When Annie finally acquiesced, there was a bitter light in her eye. Annie didn't apologize to many people, and that temporary humiliation soured her permanently on Illa. But Mercy's kindness that day was worth Annie's anger. Though Mercy had enchanted Illa hundreds of times over the years—every single basketball game, for instance—it was the hug that stayed with Illa, cementing her belief that Mercy was not only a star but a saint, too.

As Illa's embarrassment fades, Coach's words begin to drift back to her: “ . . . by this point, your bodies are machines we've tuned up over thousands of hours. Don't let things fall apart over the next few months. Summer is when championships are won or lost. Y'all gonna keep working hard?”

“Yes ma'am,” the girls say.

“Are you?”

“Yes ma'am!”

“Bring it in.”

Illa wedges her shoulder in so she can again place her hand in the stack among the others. She feels the press of the bodies against hers, the rough skin of someone's dry palm and the softer skin of a wrist.

“Lady Rays on three. One, two, three . . .”

“LADY RAYS!”

And just like that, the girls disperse, blown spores from a dandelion, away from Illa and into the locker room.

“Stark.”

“Yes ma'am?”

“Don't forget to wash the warm-ups. The navy ones. Need 'em washed and packed up for the summer.”

“Yes ma'am.”

So she won't have the locker room one last day. That's okay. She's afraid of what Annie might say, anyway. Better to keep a low profile. In the laundry room, she loads the warm-up shirts and pants into the industrial-size washing machine. When she finally makes it back to the locker room, the girls have already showered and gone to class, so she hears none of the familiar ruckus: lockers banging shut, girls belting out Shania or Britney or hollering at each other, deodorant spray cans discharging. Illa passes the cement shower bank, which gives off a dank chill, and pushes open the door to the varsity locker room. There, in the subterranean space, the silence is total except for the muffled drips from the stripped showerheads next door.