Travel Team (18 page)

“Y
OU HAVE MORE THAN JUST THE BEST HEAD FOR BASKETBALL
I'
VE EVER
seen—and that includes me,” his dad said. “You've got a great head, period. So I'm going to talk to you like you're older.”

Danny didn't know what to say to that, so he didn't say anything. Just sat there thinking again how quiet hospitals were, especially at night, the only loud sound he could hear being the soft ding of the elevator down the hall.

“I didn't just come back for you,” his dad said. “I came back for me.”

“I didn't care why you came back,” Danny said. “You were back, that's all that mattered to me.”

“But I can't have you feeling sorry for me anymore,” Richie said, trying to sit up a little, squeezing his eyes shut for a minute as he did. “I've been letting people feel sorry for me, you included, for as long as you've been alive.”

He made a motion toward the glass of ice water on the table next to him, and the pain pill the nurse had left for him. Danny got up and handed both to him, waited while his dad swallowed the pill, then took the glass back. “Your mom's right about something. Something she's been telling me for a long time. That's no way to live, just a slow way to die.”

Danny nodded, as if he understood.

His father smiled.

“I don't expect you to get all of this. But it's important that you get this: The accident that wrecked everything, for all of us, it was my fault.”

“The roads were bad that night,” Danny said. “I've read all about it a bunch of times. You lost control of the car.”

“I lost control of the car because I was drunk.”

Now the only sound in the room was the ticking of the clock above the bed.

“I never liked to let the sportswriters see me drinking after the game. Didn't want to screw up my image. But I'd always liked a few after the game, even at Syracuse. I had this equipment room down the hall where I'd go before I went out after the game. Even had a little cooler back there. That was one of the nights I drank a whole six-pack before I got in my Jeep.”

“Why are you telling me this now?” Danny said. “Why do I have to know this now? I know you drink, okay? I heard you and Mom that night at the gym. I heard her call you a drunk. Okay? I don't need to know any more bad stuff right now.”

He was shouting.

His dad didn't shout back, came at him with a voice so soft Danny imagined the words barely making it off the bed.

“It's time you knew,” Richie said.

Danny heard the ding of another elevator, wishing it were the bell telling him it was time to go to the next class.

“The cop who found me in the ditch took me to the hospital, as busted up as I was. He told them afterward that he was afraid to even call an ambulance, he thought I was dying. They asked him why he wasn't afraid to move me, and the guy—Drew Nagelson was his name—said he was afraid not to. He could smell the beer on me. He had to know I was loaded. But I remember him telling me in the car that he was a big Warriors fan.” Richie Walker smiled. “They always want to tell you that. Anyway, he asked me if I could chew some gum. I said, ‘What?' He said, ‘We've got to get the beer stink out of you.' He threw my shirt away, put a blanket on me, took me to the hospital. The doctors worked on your old dad all night. By morning, it was too late for them to take a blood alcohol test.”

“Huh?”

“It's a test they have to see how much alcohol you have in your blood system.”

“Oh,” Danny said.

“Sergeant Nagelson came by the next day, and I thanked him for saving my life. He said, ‘And your rep.' I said, ‘Yeah, and my rep.'” Richie reached out and ran his hand over his new basketball. “And from that night on, everybody has felt just awful about America's lovable little point guard getting a bad break like that. Having his career end that way. And I let them, kiddo. I let them.”

“Does Mom—?”

“Yesterday,” he said. “When I finished telling her, I told her it was the drugs talking. But it wasn't. It was the truth, the whole truth, nothing but. There was, like, a million times when I started to tell her. But I never did. And you want to know why? Because as mad as I knew she was at me for leaving the two of you, I wanted her to feel sorry for me, too.” He looked at Danny with those sad eyes as he worked his mouth into a crooked-looking smile. “The rest of the time, when she was yelling at me how drinking had ruined my life and hers more than the accident had, I just didn't have the guts.”

“No,” Danny said, not wanting to believe it.

“Yes.”

“All these years, you just let Mom think—?”

“That I was still the toughest guy going.”

“But what you did,” Danny said, “that was, like, the opposite of tough.”

“But it kept up the myth of little Richie Walker,” his dad said.

Richie said he was too tired to tell him all of it tonight, all about his drinking life. Another time, he said, when they had more time. When he had the strength to get it right.

“It's funny how things work out, though,” his dad said. “The thing that started everything—drinking—is the thing I kept turning to after I felt like my life had turned to crap.”

Danny told him about Teddy Moran saying one time that people knew the “real truth” about him, and Richie shook his head, no, saying that people suspected he was drunk that night, just because he drank as much as he did after the accident. But the only people who knew the “real truth,” at least until now, were Richie Walker himself, and Sergeant Drew Nagelson, big Warriors fan.

“Why did you come back?” Danny said. “This time, I mean?”

“I didn't have a specific plan,” his dad said. “I just knew you were my best part, and that I had to do something about that before you got too big.”

Now Danny smiled. “Me? Too big? Not a problem.”

“The only time I got drunk after coming back was that one night at Runyon's, when I started to think that starting this team was a big dumb mistake, that you guys getting your brains beat out every game was worse than if you didn't have any games at all.”

“The yelling day.”

“The yelling day,” Richie said. “I let myself get messed-up 'cause of drinking one last time. Haven't touched a drop since, if you want to know.”

“I don't, Dad,” Danny said. “I don't care.”

“I know,” he said. “But I do.”

The door opened. The nurse's head appeared again and she said in her perky nurse voice that it was getting late, and we needed our rest, didn't we, Mr. Walker?

“One minute,” Richie said to her.

To Danny he said, “I wanted us to have this season.”

“We still can.”

“
You
still can,” Richie said. “I was full of it with the other kids before, I'm going to be on the disabled list for a while.”

Might as well ask him.

“Who's gonna coach us?” Danny said.

“Don't worry,” Richie said. “I got a guy in mind who'd be perfect.”

K
ELVIN
N
ORRIS
—
THE GREAT
C
OACH
K
EL FROM LAST YEAR
'
S TRAVEL TEAM
, cool-guy hero to all his players and all their parents—was waiting for them in the gym when they showed up for Thursday's practice. With the exception of Danny, who knew Coach Kel was coming, the rest of the players were expecting Mr. Harden to run his last practice with the Warriors before leaving town the next day.

Except they walked into St. Pat's at six-thirty and there was Coach Kel, in baggy sweats almost as dark as his skin and a bright yellow T-shirt that read “B. Silly.” The sight of him got an immediate whoop out of Bren and Will, the guys he'd coached before. And even from Matt Fitzgerald, who remembered him as being cool just from having tried out for the sixth-grade team.

“You couldn't tell me he was coming?” Will said to Danny. “Not even a stinking hint?”

Danny shrugged. “I wanted to surprise you.”

Will said, “Once trust is gone in a relationship, what is there?”

From across the court, in a boom-box voice, Coach Kel said, “Stoddard, why don't you go run some laps instead of runnin' your mouth.”

Will's mouth opened and closed and, for once, nothing came out.

Coach Kel grinned. “I'm just playin',” he said. “You know.”

Bren said, “I can't believe you're here.”

“When Richie Walker calls from his damn hospital bed and asks for a favor, you don't say no, I'm not in the mood, Richie Walker. Or, no, I'm too busy, Richie Walker.”

Coach Kel went around and introduced himself to the other Warriors.

“Say hello to your substitute teacher,” he said. “You ever hear of a movie called
To Sir, With Love
? Starring the great Sidney Poitier?”

He got blank looks from everybody, as if he'd started speaking Russian to them.

“In that case,” he said, “go get in two lines and shoot some damn layups.”

He told them Danny was going to be his assistant coach tonight, just so they could make things feel like normal, run practice the way they usually did when Coach Walker was there.

“Just want to see your basic stuff,” he said.

You always got the feeling with Coach Kel that he wanted to use another s-word instead of
stuff
, but kept it inside him like he was a bottle with the cap still on it.

Once they got going, got into their stuff, Danny realized this was exactly like the picture of the court, the other players, he'd take sometimes when they were starting their offense; when he didn't even have to look at the left side of the court when he was over on the right side because he knew where everybody was. He knew what drills they were supposed to run, in what order, what plays his dad had them working on at their last practice, the new way he had them set up when they went to a zone press.

Coach Kel leaned over at one point and said, “Even when you were just eleven, I used to tell people I was just waitin' on that little body of yours to grow into that big basketball
brain.
”

“You sound just like my dad,” Danny said.

“Gonna take that there as a compliment,” Coach Kel said.

He had shaved his head completely bald, and as soon as he started getting on the court and showing them how he thought they should be doing something, you could see the little raindrops of sweat start to form on top of his head. He was also wearing retro Air Jordans, the red-and-black ones.

Will once said that guys would notice what sneakers you were wearing before they noticed whether or not you were carrying a paint gun.

They scrimmaged hard for the last half hour, really hard, Coach Kel saying he was going to push them, that he really wanted them to show him what they all had. And they did. Maybe it was because of what had happened to Danny's dad, but it was serious ball with the Warriors tonight, even less messing around than when Coach Walker was in the gym and blowing the whistle and calling the shots.

Somehow—and not just because Coach Kel was a high-energy guy who always kept you fired up, about basketball and life—they all seemed to know what they were supposed to be doing tonight without being told.

Go figure.

When they were done, right before parents started showing up, Will said, “See you Saturday, Coach K.”

Coach Kel looked at him. “Say what?”

“I said, we'll see you Saturday,” Will said. “For the Kirkland game.”

Coach Kel said, “Won't be here Saturday, big hair. I guess I should have told y'all from the jump. I'm coaching the JV at Christ the King this season. I just came tonight to get you
through
tonight. Like I was sayin', as a favor to Coach Richie.”

“Then who's going to coach us against Kirkland?” Bren Darcy said.

“Don't know,” Coach Kel said. “Danny's dad just said that him and the other parents were gonna come up with a Plan B by then.”

Will said, “Excuse me, but we thought you were Plan B.”

“Only for tonight.”

On their way out of the gym, Will said to Danny, “You got any bright ideas, Mr. Point Guard?”

“I thought you were the idea man,” Danny said to him.

“Not this time.”

Danny said, “Then we better do what we always do when we have a crisis.”

He looked at Will and at the same time they both said, “Call Tess.”

It had been arranged with Ali Walker before practice that Coach Kel would drive him home.

“Keep your eye on the prize, little man,” Coach Kel said when he got out of the car.

“I'm trying, Coach K,” Danny said. “I'm trying.”

When he got inside, his mom was walking around with the portable phone. She put her hand over the mouth part and said, “I'm talking to Mrs. Stoddard, we're trying to come up with a plan for Saturday's game, and the other games before the play-offs.”

He went upstairs to work on some English homework he hadn't been able to finish in study hall, just because his mind kept going back to his dad's crazy plan. When he was done with homework, he opened his door a crack and gave a listen. His mom must have finished with Molly Stoddard, because right then he heard the chirp of the phone.

He had a feeling he knew who it was, and what was coming next.

Knew there was probably going to be some yelling in the house.

The first thing he heard: “No. Absolutely not. Out of the question.”

Danny didn't cover his head with a pillow this time. He pulled on his new hooded Gap sweatshirt, part of his Christmas clothes, grabbed the Infusion ball out of the closet, went quietly down the stairs, slipped out the back door, put on the driveway floodlight and the light over the basket, went out on the part of the driveway near the basket he had shoveled himself, having managed to keep that area—his area—bone dry despite all the snow they'd been having lately.

He had forgotten to shut the back door. When he went over, he heard his mom say, “…a head injury the doctors must have missed. Because you can't do this, Richard. I won't let you.”

“Richard”
was never good, that had been Danny's experience.

He closed the door firmly this time, shot around for a couple of minutes, then stepped away from the basket and went right to the double crossover.

He went back and forth with the ball. Then again. Then again. Three times without missing, then four, never looking down at the ball once. His fingers felt like icicles in the night, but even that didn't matter, because for this night Danny felt as if he had the ball on a string.

As if he could do anything he wanted with it.

His mom was still on the phone when he came back inside. But now she had closed the door to the small study off the dining room that served as her office.

At least she wasn't yelling anymore.

He snuck over, put his ear to the door, heard: “I understand you can't quit now. That they can't quit now. It's why we're having the parents' meeting here tomorrow night…. No,
you
can explain it to them, Rich.”

They had at least moved off “Richard.”

Danny went to the kitchen, microwaved himself up some hot chocolate, took the mug up to his room.

Time to get Tess into the loop.

C
ROSSOVER
2: Hey. Tall Girl. You there?

When in doubt,
always
talk to the tall girl.

C
ON
T
ESSA
44: On 24-hour call. Even when doing our dopey outline on
The Pearl.

C
ROSSOVER
2: You mean Earl the Pearl?

C
ON
T
ESSA
44: Don't tell me. Another legend of the hardwood.

C
ROSSOVER
2: Hardwood?

C
ON
T
ESSA
44: You forget. My dad talks like he goes through life doing the six o'clock sports report.

Danny went to his door, poked his head out. No yelling from downstairs. No talking, period. Unless she'd worked herself all the way down to whispering.

Maybe she was actually listening.

He went back to his new Sony.

C
ON
T
ESSA
44: What's on your mind, cutie?

C
ROSSOVER
2: ShutUP.

It was like they were waiting each other out. Or she knew he had something on his mind.

As if she could read his mind, too.

C
ROSSOVER
2: We have to get a new coach. Or we're toast.

C
ON
T
ESSA
44: I heard.

C
ROSSOVER
2: Coach Kel did tonight.

C
ON
T
ESSA
44: Will told me. But just tonight, he said.

C
ROSSOVER
2: Yeah.

C
ON
T
ESSA
44: So we need a plan.

Downstairs, he thought he might have heard a laugh.

C
ROSSOVER
2: My dad actually came up with a plan.

He could hear his mom coming up the stairs.

C
ON
T
ESSA
44: Who does he want to coach?

It didn't take long to type out his answer.

He could keep up with her when he kept it this simple.

When he'd replay the scene in his head later, another scene he thought would have to be in the movie, he remembered getting the answer he wanted from the two women in his life pretty much at the exact same moment.

His mom was in the doorway when he turned around, hands on her hips the way she had been on Christmas Day when she had watched him and his dad finish up their video game.

Basically smiling the same smile.

“Hey, Coach,” she said.

He turned back to the screen when he heard the old doodlely-doo.

C
ON
T
ESSA
44: Cool.

When he didn't respond right away, she did.

C
ON
T
ESSA
44: Very VERY cool.

Before he got himself calmed down enough to think about going to sleep, he took the Kidd poster off the wall, carefully laid it out on the bed, made sure to smooth out any wrinkly places, took off his LeBrons, went over to the wall, placed the pen on top of his head.

Made his mark.

Turned around.

The new line was an inch higher than the line he'd made in October the last time he'd measured himself.

Fifty-six inches.

He took out the tape measure just to make sure.

Fifty-six on the button.

He'd grown an inch!