Up at the College (21 page)

“I hear ya’, dawg,” Curtis told him, thinking that Charles wasn’t fooling anybody. That negro knew he was going over to Denzelle’s
church because that was where Veronica Washington was. Curtis had watched Charles checking Veronica out on several occasions,
and the boy had it bad for that girl. Only problem was that Miss Thing was super-saved, and the only way he was going to roll
up on that sister was via the Lord.

The room was quiet for a moment before Charles said, “Curtis, man, you need to get up out of here. Rumpshakers ain’t a place
for a brother like yourself. There’re some sweet girls here. They work hard and they are straight up. But I have yet to encounter
one who knew about the Lord or was contemplating trying to make His acquaintance.”

Curtis couldn’t say a word. He was convicted down to the bone. Maurice had been getting on him about coming to Rumpshakers
for some time now. But Curtis
knew
he was wrong to come here when the owner told him that his butt didn’t need to be in his establishment.

Charles’s cell buzzed. He flicked it open.

“Yeah. He’s still here. Okay, man. Come on down.”

Curtis raised an eyebrow.

Charles flipped the cell closed and said, “It’s all good.”

“Why don’t you have a Bluetooth?”

“Awww, man,” Charles said. “I know I should but I can’t stand that thing in my ear.”

There was a heavy-fisted knock on the door.

“Come on in, Bay,” Charles said. Bay was the only person who worked for him with such a distinctive sound to his knock. Charles
couldn’t even describe what distinguished Bay’s knock. But he always knew when Bay was knocking on the door.

“Coach, you need to check this out,” Bay said and handed Charles and Curtis some information he’d just pulled off the Internet.

Curtis scanned the first page and frowned.

“Is this my contract?”

“Yeah. But it’s the part that you’ve never seen,” Bay told him.

Curtis read all three pages quickly.

“Is this saying what I think it is saying?”

“Ummm … hmmm,” Bay said. “It is saying exactly what you think it is saying. In any given season, Sam Redmond can terminate
you at will if you don’t win a certain amount of games.”

“Is there a number of games to be won?”

“Nope, not really. The number is at Dr. Redmond’s discretion. And he is planning on using one of his discretionary numbers
at your expense in a couple of weeks.”

Curtis sat back and ran his hands across his head. He knew that his job—and Maurice’s for that matter—was on the line. He
knew that it wasn’t due to anything that he’d done or hadn’t done. But he also thought that he had time to fix it.

“Uh, Bay, how did you get this? Why are you showing it to me?”

Bay smiled and pulled up a seat. It was at times like these that he loved his work and being able to make a difference in
someone’s life. He’d recently turned his life over to the Lord, and knew that he’d have to leave this job at some point. But
while he was here, he’d used his gifts and talents to help as many people as he could. Bay felt blessed that he had stayed
at Rumpshakers long enough to help two people he thought very highly of—Coach Curtis Parker and Marquita Robinson Sneed.

“Coach, I got it after I discovered the plot that is on this DVD to snatch your job right out from under you for all of the
wrong reasons.” Bay put a copy of the DVD chronicling what he and Pierre and Mr. Robinson had recently witnessed in Curtis’s
hand. “This is a copy of a meeting between Sam Redmond, Kordell Bivens, Sonny Todd Kilpatrick, Jethro Winters, Gilead Jackson,
and Rico Sneed.”

“Rico Sneed,” Curtis asked, trying to figure out what in the world Rico Sneed was doing all up in the mix with anything that
had to do with the basketball program. Come to think of it, he wanted to know why Jethro Winters was there, too.

“Sam Redmond wants to fire you and give Sonny Todd your job. Gilead Jackson and Kordell Bivens have been working overtime
to make it hard for you. And I’d bet some money that some of your losses were not by accident. Some were setups. Jethro Winters
wants the contract to build the luxury housing development the university wants for its elite faculty members. You know about
that project, don’t you?”

Curtis nodded. “But,” he said, “what I don’t understand is how the rest of all of this fits with that. Jethro Winters is always
trying to find a way to make a big buck off of black folk.”

“They believe that if they hire Sonny Todd, he’ll win the conference title, the school will get a lot of money, folks will
be happy, and they will be able to use this newfound clout to garner support for Jethro being awarded the contract. And don’t
forget that if Jethro gets that contract, then Sam Redmond and Gilead Jackson will get more money to line their pockets.”

“And Kordell Bivens. What does he get?” Curtis asked.

“Honestly, Coach, I think he’ll get to continue doing what he is already doing, just with more money.”

“But he doesn’t do anything,” Curtis said.

“Well, he can keep doing nothing. He’ll just make more money doing it.”

“So what am I to do with all of this?”

“Put your foot all the way up their behinds and twist it around a few minutes before you pull it back out.”

Curtis raised an eyebrow.

“You didn’t read all of the information I gave you.”

Curtis flipped through the rest of the pages and grinned. He said, “Sam Redmond gets to select the number of games I have
to win so he can fire me. He gets to select the team I have to replay so he can fire me. But I get to control when and where
the game is played. Is that right?”

Bay nodded, grinning. Most folk wouldn’t see that last part as a reason to get glad in the midst of a storm brewing. But he
knew that Curtis Parker would see this as the opportunity of a lifetime. Coach loved a good fight—especially a fight that
gave the appearance of a no-win situation. And if winning was on the side of right—Coach Parker was good to go.

“Bay is the man,” Charles said. “So what are you going to do now?”

“I am going to follow procedure, request a rematch with Sonny Todd’s team—”

“I thought you all already had that in about two weeks,” Charles said.

“He has six weeks,” Bay said, grinning from ear to ear as he gave Curtis some dap.

“I like the way you think, Bay,” Curtis said.

“Could somebody clue me in?” Charles asked. There was nothing about this that made sense to him.

“You keep up with Coach’s stats, right?”

Charles nodded.

“But do you keep up with Coach Kilpatrick’s stats?”

“No.”

“You ought to,” Bay told him. “See, Sonny Todd is strongest at the front end of the season. Coach here gets stronger and stronger
as the season progresses. Sonny Todd’s players are reckless and aggressive. So the best ones get hurt or kicked out of the
game by season’s end. And Coach’s best players get better and stronger as the season progresses.”

“So how does that work for Curtis? And why is it that Sonny Todd wins most times?”

“The president of Bouclair College lets him do his own schedule and he knows exactly who to play and when. Plus, Sonny Todd
is the conference champ and gets first dibs on the schedule. And the coaches who get pissed and protest the schedule—”

“Coaches like Curtis?” Charles queried.

“Yeah, the coaches in SNAC like Curtis—the ones who know that Sonny Todd should not have that kind of carte blanche in the
conference—those are the coaches who are either bought off, up for new contracts, or have athletic directors like Gilead Jackson,
who are on the take and run roughshod over the coaches demanding to have the schedule modified to their specifications.”

“That is triflin’,” Charles said. “Curtis, you and I both know some serious criminals from back in the day who would never
do something as low and raunchy as that.”

Curtis nodded. Charles was right. They had grown up with some thugs who had matured into some of the biggest and most dangerous
underworld figures in the area. And not one of those men, as scary as they were, would stoop to do something that low. They
had standards—that’s why they were so good at doing wrong.

“Coach,” Bay said, “I’ve pulled up this info on Sonny Todd.”

He put a folder in Curtis’s hands.

“You need to play him after Thanksgiving break, right when you get ready to go into finals. You’ll see after reading that
information that this is when Sonny Todd is at his weakest. So ask for these dates—November thirtieth or December third.”

“Done,” Curtis said and stood up. “I better get going. There is a lot to be done and I need to get up with Maurice.”

“And you need to get up with the Lord,” Bay said in a serious voice. “You’ve been blessed, Coach. God is letting you know
that He has your back. So what are you going to do about your relationship with the Lord?”

Curtis didn’t say anything. He didn’t know what to say. Here he was at the hottest strip club in Durham, and everything coming
out of the mouths of the folks who worked here was about the Lord. If that wasn’t a trip. But Gran Gran always told him that
the Lord worked in mysterious ways. Couldn’t get much more mysterious than this.

Bay sighed heavily, not caring if they saw him look up and then heard him say, “Jesus, give me strength.” He said, “Coach,
the Lord just dropped this in my spirit. Look, you can beat this thing. I’m telling you, as bad as it looks, this is a win-win,
pimp-slap- Goliath-and-his-mama-too situation. But the only way you are going to triumph is to get right with God and let
Him direct your path. Please, Coach, go to church this weekend, fall on the mercy seat, rededicate your life to the Lord,
and let God get the glory.

“Because guess what? This really ain’t about you or that team or your job or winning against Sonny Todd Kilpatrick. This is
about you letting folks see God working in your life and letting folks see the difference between being a Kingdom man, a carnal
man, and a man of the world. As crazy as this must sound, this game is all about God.”

Curtis nodded. He knew that was a true Word from the Lord. Gran Gran had pretty much told him the exact same thing about a
week ago.

“I’m outta here. It’s been real.”

“See you in church on Sunday, man,” Charles said.

“You’ll be there?” Curtis asked. “I thought you were headed over to Raleigh to help out a frat brother in distress.”

“Heck yeah, I’ll be at Fayetteville this Sunday. Do you honestly think that I am going to miss seeing you falling prostrate
on the altar of the Lord? Man, that will be almost as good as what happened at New Jerusalem.”

“Whew!” Bay said, eyes lighting up. “That thang was something. I found the whole episode on YouTube. And that soloist? Baby
had a booty hanging off of her that made getting pimp-slapped by her worth it. She could slap me any day, if she just let
me bounce the palm of my hand off of
that
thang.”

Bay slapped his palm in the air to emphasize his point.

“Bay, I thought you were now among the redeemed,” Charles told him. “You can’t go around harping on the booty like that.”

Bay grinned and said, “I was having a moment in the flesh.” He then waved at them and went back to his office to keep tabs
on all the lowlives doing business at Rumpshakers today.

Y
vonne eased into one of the many parking spaces surrounding the Athletic Center, trying not to fuss about the injustice of
this parking lot situation. It got on her nerves so bad that the Athletic Department was so selfish about this. She kept threatening
to park in Gilead Jackson’s spot. But she always changed her mind when she thought about her baby languishing in that Chapel
Hill towing parking lot, surrounded by all of those mean dogs.

Yvonne was ten minutes early for her nine-thirty meeting with members of the basketball team’s coaching staff and the athletic
director about five of the players who were taking her class. She didn’t have a clue what this meeting was about, and hoped
Maurice would be there. Yvonne did not like Gilead Jackson, Kordell Bivens, or Castilleo Palmer, and didn’t want to be in
a meeting with those men minus somebody who she knew had her back.

She finished listening to one of her favorite songs, “Jericho” by Senior Pastor Jason Nelson of Greater Bethlehem Temple Apostolic
Church in Randalstown, Maryland, right outside of Baltimore. His twin brother, Jonathan, had lit up the gospel music charts
with his song “My Name Is Victory,” and was about to do it again with his newest song, “Right Now Praise.” Those twins were
some singing fools, and their older brother, James, could preach your shoes off your feet and put them back on, laces tied
to perfection. “Jericho” was an upbeat song filled to the brim with Holy Ghost power for being victorious on the battlefield
of spiritual warfare. And Yvonne knew she did not need to waltz herself in that meeting without getting girded up just like
the Word instructed her to do at the end of Ephesians 6.

Something wasn’t right about this meeting. Yvonne didn’t know what it was. But she knew in her heart that something was up.
She dug around in her purse and pulled out a tiny vial of anointing oil, put a few drops in her hand, and anointed her head.

“Lord, keep a blood covering over me in Jesus’s name. Father, give me wisdom and the courage to do Your will in this situation.
In Jesus’s name I pray, amen.”

Yvonne got out of the car and made her way to the conference room, which Maurice had told her was on the first floor. This
was an impressive building and it was clear that the school had dropped a whole lot of money in it. But she thought her building
was much nicer—even if it didn’t have enough parking spaces. There were some definite advantages to being in the Department
of Design. They could make sure that their building represented what was going on inside.

Yvonne loved her job. It was the first time in a long while that she’d had a job where she got to do what she loved to do—interior
and exterior design, painting, furniture design, and teaching. She worked with some of the kindest and sweetest people on
campus, and had great hours for a single mom.