Winners (2 page)

He spent most of that empty year sitting in the front room, staring out the windows like a cooped-up hunting dog. A man encased in wax. He slept late, hopped down the stairs to collect the morning paper, threw it up to the landing, crawled back on hands and knees and filthy yellow cast. Sprawled across the couch, taking painkillers for no particular reason, he started at the upper left-hand corner of the paper and consumed it comprehensively, finishing each story, following the jump pages inside and then circling back. The gay guy was taking on the black guy for mayor, the Nasdaq hit 5,000, the opera tried the Ring Cycle but critics were mixed. Oracle was hiring and hiring and hiring. No one was firing. Some dude already wanted to sell his green ’99 Outback and Carl Deed, eighty-five, died at home, survived by a younger brother. When he’d finished every word he turned on the television and watched sports. One channel showed old games, classics, where slim Pickney danced through Georgetown’s monsters, Bednarik flattened Gifford, Valenzuela slouched heavy from the mound, again and again.

He slept and ate constantly, making extravagant lists for his wife of needed food. He fried potatoes several times a week, cooking them twice to perfect the crunch, filling the house with the rich tang of oil. He ate too much cheese. He’d always been healthy, pretty naturally: you worked with your body, cooked at home, you hooped six days a week and got to be a decent specimen. Stunned by inactivity, the specimen decayed slowly, waiting to walk again, to run, expecting to snap out of it and return to the old body as if arriving home after a brief, disastrous vacation. His own scent turned stale, then sour. By the time foot break number three rolled around he really really really didn’t give a shit. He sank down into the couch with a sense of permanence and ate and watched TV and eyed the busy city with all its filthy chimneys and all its busy, pleased prosperity.

His wife, Lou, meanwhile worked like crazy and managed and provided and paid the bills. She was seldom home. He missed her but they both wordlessly agreed she might as well take advantage of his shittiness by taking care of business. She left him alone. She went on business trips. She went to conferences. It seemed possible that at one of them she might have kissed someone. She must have thought about it at least. This damaged Shane was not a man she recognized, but they both thought they could wait it out. During her absence and his hibernation Lou continued to operate the house by computer remote control. A cleaning woman appeared once a week. Clothes, books, movies, meals, curtains, light bulbs, electronics arrived at their front door. Brightly colored bins and boxes came and went in the bulky arms of young men made cheerful by stock options. Doing him the favor, they’d carry everything up the stairs, biceps bulging out of tight knit neo-corporate-branded shirts, asking what’d ya do, how d’ya do it, aw dude bummer, nodding respectfully at his curt response. They left him there with the goods and the receipts and he spent the afternoon examining the artifacts, balancing on one foot as he put them away.

After eight months of hardly working, he’d finally climbed back into the van in April, resurrecting the business, although to his wife’s dismay he didn’t hire anyone to help. For days he called old clients, reminding them he was alive, invoking his father, strolling down memory lane. He was quickly busy again. He went to physical therapy in the evenings and an obscure gym at night. Not his wife’s luxurious Paragon, not his b-ball buddies’ well-equipped Koret, not the spanking Y downtown. A cramped and dank low-ceilinged thing on outer Mission where no one known could possibly arrive. He hired a cheap, enormous man named Craig to be his personal trainer and grappled with machines as Craig bullied him to greater weight, one more, one more. Craig yelled at him and he fantasized about dropping enormous barbells on the giant’s toes and neck.

But slowly his old calves and thighs emerged. His stomach hardened again. A recognizable shape returned. His clothes shrank tight around his shoulders, neck, arms, thighs. It was as if someone had challenged him to construct a body that could never break again. He began to run miles and miles through the summer wind and fog, striding out through the avenues in outrageous orthopedic shoes, touching the ocean sand and then hustling back. He stretched in the morning after waking up and at night before going to sleep. He exercised his foot and ankle for hours, rotating and flexing against the resistance of blood red Therabands.

It was August before he could play again, after a secret month of practicing alone at the middle school down the hill from their house. In the hours between the gym and Lou’s coming home he’d jog down to the empty court to run sprints, shoot, dribble, jump. Shuffled side to side, changed direction quickly. Threw hard chest passes to the concrete walls. Afterwards he’d go home and sit on the stairs and feel his foot, stick his finger against the exact point of the healed break. Press until it hurt. Bend the foot up and down, side to side. There were days when it still felt sore, and his doctor told him the healing process would not be final, continuing for years.

“You’re very stubborn,” his doctor said. “You should take up golf.”

“Like Jordan.”

“They say it’s an excellent game.”

“Sure.” He was almost a friend by now, this doctor, another local who grew up in the Richmond and had sports sins of his own.

“What about surfing.”

“What about basketball.”

“What will you do when you break your foot again?”

“Jump off the Golden Gate. Little hang time before I go.”

“Well. Keep hitting the gym.”

“I hate the gym.”

“Strength is everything. Flexibility is everything.”

“I’m strong. I’m flexible. I never went to the gym in my life.”

“Well you do now,” his doctor said. “I seen guys like you, work with their hands for a living, think they’re fit, never been hurt in their lives. And then wham-bam. Your body will make you listen to it, eventually.”

But in the end his doctor gave him his blessing and glucosamine and calcium and sent him on his way.

The shocking thing was that the world survived. It didn’t absolutely need him, it turned out, it didn’t depend on his good health or character or contributions and found a way to function smoothly in his absence. But when he returned quietly to the land of the living, nothing was the same. It was as if he’d lost his seat and he couldn’t find it again and couldn’t find another one either. So he stood, kept moving, he worked, he paid bills, he put money in Ma’s account, he spoke sternly to his delinquent brother, he cheered on his busy wife and sometimes begged for children, he fixed the van and painted the bedroom and cooked dinner and did all the things he did before and nothing was the same because for a little while there he plain gave up. He gave up, he fucked up, he knew it, and he swore he’d never do it again.

The cell phone rings through and she answers on the first ring. “It’s me,” he says.

“Hey. It’s my favorite Homo sapiens. I was just thinking about you.”

“Between meetings.”

“Between meetings. During meetings.” She drops her voice to her open-office whisper, a tone she has developed to create privacy where there’s none. Her voice like that has a distorted sound, the muffled echo of holding a hand over her mouth. “Was there an earthquake? Did you molest me this morning?”

“Yes. And yes.”

“Oh goodie. I didn’t see anything online so I thought I made it all up.”

“Do you remember your five dreams?”

“No. I don’t dream. I gave it up. Something had to go.”

He hears the staccato of a keyboard. “Are you multitasking me?”

“Sorry. It’s nuts here today. Our server’s possessed. And I’m waiting for the Wallet to call.”

“I’ll let you go. ETA tonight?”

“Decent.”

He turns onto his favorite street, the street that leads to the court.

“I’ve got nothing much to say except I love you.”

“Oh my. Say that again.”

“You heard me, lady.”

“I love you too. I’ll call later.”

“Okay.”

The phone winks once and falls gently into his lap. I’ll work late, he thinks. Lou. Then his body remembers what’s about to happen, and he guns it up the steep street, parking quickly and jogging up the stairs to the court.

T
HE FIREHOUSE SHOULD
be packed. Noon is the unofficial starting time but most hot September Fridays have guys showing up by 11:35. Everyone wants to be first, no one wants to wait. Shane arrives late but somehow he has beat the rush and jumps on right away with Alex and Dragon and Finesse. And Jimmy.

“I got some information,” his brother says as they walk out to the court, his enormous feet flapping like clown shoes. Rex likes to call him Sasquatch, although everyone else just sticks with Jimmy.

“Save it,” Shane says. “Let’s get these guys.”

Shane hits the first shot of the game, brushing his defender off an excellent pick from his brother. He slips past Jimmy’s shoulder and the pass from Finesse is waiting for him at the rendezvous. The orange ball comes spinning into his hands, the knees bend and the toes flex and in one easy gentle wave the body ripples up, the right hand firm behind the ball, the left relaxed as guide. The elbow straightens, the ball goes off, the wrist flops like the Palmolive lady dipping her fingers in a regenerative salve. Spinning backwards, the ball slices through the still air, and Shane lands on the ground with his wrist still flopped and takes a step forward, moving toward the hoop to follow his shot. But the shot is going in. He knows it, he watches the ball hit the back of the rim and the backspin sends it down, buh-chu, dropping briskly into the net like someone stepping through a door for an appointment. He starts backpedaling for defense, arms loose, jaw relaxed, and Jimmy is there beside him, not looking but putting his fist out for a bump. Bump bump.

“All day,” Jimmy says quietly, and slides off to guard his own man.

A dynasty. Some of the big-time players are missing today—Mac, Skeletor, D-One—and Alex owns the boards, Dragon and Finesse are hitting, there’s no one to stop them from winning five straight games except maybe the heat. The heat almost gets them, too, dropping their hands to hips and knees, forcing them to breathe conscientiously and complain. Goddamn. Finally they slump smugly to the pavement, slick with sweat, congratulating one another on all those whuppings in a row. Shane stares at his shoe, exhausted, his face stretched out in a smile by some happy pressure in his head. The fibers of his shoelace seem distinct and visible.

“Wife cooked my peas last night,” Finesse is saying. They laugh. They all use frozen peas to ice their parts: ankles, knees, elbows.

“How that ankle?”

“Ah, you know, for shit. Every time I sprain it I think, time to hang it up.”

“Nah.”

“I don’t know, it gets so I’m afraid to go home. I walk in that door with a limp? and my wife starts yelling at me so loud she has to put her hands on her own ears. The neighbors must think I’m beating her silly.”

“The neighbors don’t hoop.”

“They never do, do they?”

Shane closes his eyes, his sweat-soaked shirt balled up beside him, bare skin roasting in the sun. On these rare hot days, there’s nowhere to hide. The guys have talked about planting a tree up here to get some shade. A tree: like they’ll all keep coming up here long enough to wait for a goddamn tree. It cracks them up. It’s one of their favorite conversations. What tree and when, irrigation, growing cycles. Live oak versus hybrid laurel.

He finds his cell phone and glances at the time. He’s already late for his afternoon appointment. Afternoons after ball, he is always late.

“So you want the news or what,” Jimmy says.

“What’s that, you got a job?” Some of the other guys are getting up, reluctantly, collecting their stuff, moving on.

“Me? Now what would I do with a job.”

“I don’t know. Stick it up your ass.”

“Oh yeah, in da butt, Bob, definitely. In da butt.”

“What.”

“Sam,” Jimmy says, nodding slowly. “Rex says he still goes over that gym where they all used to go.”

“Which?”

“You know, that people’s gym went over the dark side? Where all these dudes went. Over in Potrero.”

They turn east and for the second time that day Shane finds himself looking at the tall ridge running between Sixteenth and Twenty-sixth Streets. Beyond it, the far thigh of the San Francisco Bay. From this direction the orange-roofed projects are invisible but he can make out a white bulbous water tower on top of the hill, a patch of green that looks like a miniature park. His brother’s talking about a place on the downtown side, nestled into the South of Market fringe. His wife’s gym, the hippest in the city.

“No shit.” Shane looks around for Rex but the big guy’s already gone. “Hey,” Shane calls out to the rest, “any of you still go over to Paragon?”

“Naw. Not since it was Mike’s, man. We all over at Koret.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“Hell yeah. They don’t even got a court no more over there.”

“Just all that dot-com step kick spinning Tae Bo shit.”

“Pretty boys and yoga bitches.”

“Whoa, dude, yoga works.”

“Mike’s though, Mike’s was the shit, bunch a fucking boneheads, free weights, sick little runs over there, that little half court? Shay, you never came down there, huh?”

“Nope,” Shane says.

“Yeah, you the outside purist natural man.”

“Working on his savage tan.”

“Parole officers, remember that, they come in to Mike’s looking for their runners. Remember that?”

“You wouldn’t even recognize that place now.”

“I know, I seen it.”

“What’s Sam doing there?”

“No idea.”

“We used to get him in on guest pass,” Finesse says, “trying to bulk that kid up.”

“That was fuck long ago. He still there?”

“Sam, huh. Y’all still looking for him?”

“Yeah,” Jimmy says.

Sam was fifteen when they first played ball with him, pure arms and legs with a tiny little head on top. Five years ago, been up there ever since. An ugly cute kid, oddly colored, Sam’s always struggled to grow into a body that seems to be assembled from quality spare parts. Skin half-baked between white and black, freckles on the inside of his arms, short almost-brown hair that’s always trying to become huge and shrubby. Big full Crayola lips, thin pointy nose, small dark eyes too close together. No body hair except for one small patch shaped like Nevada behind the right shoulder. He’s one of those guys you look at and want to ask: what are you? Shane doubts Sam’s physical self has ever served him well except when it comes to playing basketball.

Basketball, though—basketball transforms him absolutely. Shane’s seen it happen when Sam pulls within earshot of the bouncing ball. His walk changes, he starts the strut: chest out, shoulders back, arms bowed out lightly, a looseness in the forward hips. His shiny red sweatpants swinging loose around his legs, flaring out around his ankles like some seventies pimp royalty. He looks cocky. He plays young. Sam glides and bounces, floats and lopes. There are better shooters and passers and defenders and ball handlers but the way Sam moves through space still makes them stare. Sam has youth, and the rest of them have started to lose it. The whites of the kid’s eyes are whiter, the skin on his arms tighter, his smell more vegetable, less animal. A smoothness in his cheek and scalp. They aren’t friends, none of them up there are really friends, they have this zealot thing they do together and that’s it. All right maybe some of them hit the gym together, or meet up to watch a big game now and then. Not Shane. Never. The pure thing to do, he believes, is to keep everything on the court. But even Shane feels something extra for Sam, with his freckles and his big hair, they all do, they all feel something for the kid growing up before their eyes. For five years they’ve cheered him, given him shit, teased him about his flashy sneakers, complained about the gold chain and ratty watch he refuses to take off. Even Lou has heard about him: the kid, she’ll say sometimes, how’s the kid?

They’ve taught him things, too. The way Sam spins he got from Anthony; that little jump hook Bindo taught him; Ray’s one-two dribble behind the back. And every time Sam sets a down pick at the foul line, Shane remembers the morning years ago, between games, showing him what that simple trick could do. No glory—just a teammate wide open to the hoop. For glory, Sam had the dunk.

Sam had been playing with them for a few years by then. He was eighteen, he was growing, he was jumping in disturbing ways. The guys had started taking him to Mike’s Muscle, trying to bulk him up. Or sometimes instead he’d kick around with Skeletor, a true leaper, who was showing him the footwork, the brute mechanics of dunking a basketball. Sam could get up there just fine, high enough to use two hands, but something wasn’t adding up. Maybe there were secret sessions, because the first time any of them saw Sam do it was in a game. A game was ten times harder. They all remembered: Sam picking off the bad pass at midcourt and tossing the ball out in front of him. The ball bounced out alone as Sam staggered toward it like the fastest drunk man in the world, and when he caught up he grabbed it with one hand, stretched out his legs in one long stride, and leapt to leave the earth for good. A bright day with the sun baking the amphitheater of the court. Sam took off and the rest of them stopped, waiting for the collision of boy and rim. Two hands, Sam flying, reaching for the rim like the edge of a thousand-foot cliff. He dunked. The ball went flying through and Sam hung on to the iron for his life, swinging two long full seconds like a lusty chimp, dropping to the ground crouched and ready, arms extended to wrestle or Kung fu.

Skeletor was the first, turning away from all of them, stretching his arms out to the city. “Gahd-damn!” he roared, and then all of them were swearing and whooping, slapping one another. “I think I have a hard-on,” Jimmy said.

Shane laughed and Jimmy laughed and when Sam looked over their laughs had settled to great dimpling smiles meant for him. They must have seemed to Sam like two creatures as different from himself as plankton or giraffes: full-grown, full-white, Irish-looking lads, right proportioned and even handsome, relaxing comfortable in their bodies. Wide shoulders, good chins, thick sandy hair, long light lashes, blue eyes. Catholic schools and college educations stowed behind their excellent teeth. Sam caught them smiling at him the way brothers smile at each other and in that instant of inclusion they watched him fight it for a second before the hard knot in his jaw relaxed. It was the kind of smile that bunched up in the middle of the face instead of spreading side to side, the lips almost puckering, the face contracted. The smile trying not to smile. They came rarely but Shane still got to see those smiles a good couple times over the years.

Sam is missing.

For five years, the kid’s been out there every week. He never misses. If not on Tuesday, Thursday; if not on Thursday, Friday. It’s rare that he’s absent any of those days. Shane knows because he never misses either, broken feet aside.

The last time Sam showed was a month ago. They’ve been speculating: he moved, got hurt, arrested, married, a job, a kid. These are all known causes for guys’ disappearances in the past. There are players Shane remembers from ten years ago who stopped showing up forever; there are others who wink out for a while and then return with some explanation why.

It happens, but the game goes on. A chimney sweep breaks his foot. A twenty-year-old kid vanishes. A sportswriter buys a house in Marin or Stockton, a physical therapist takes on one too many clients, the record store dude opens a second shop, the bartender gets a desk job. The cook moves to Texas, the painter lands a big fat contract with the city. There are babies born, shapes lost. Surgeries. Businesses are born and die, love is consummated and dissolved.

Shane used to think that their game was in grave danger of ending any time. They don’t know each other, after all, not in the way people know people: addresses, educations, spouses, lineage, religion, income, backgrounds, beliefs. Last names. Phone numbers. Addresses, emails. They don’t know any of that. Two or three bad weeks of weather or no-shows might be all it takes. One guy loses faith, stops coming, then another guy, and before they know it the game’s over. Yet in all the years he’s been coming to the Firehouse, those two or three bad weeks have simply never happened. The noon time comes and the guys show up. The game goes on.

Chances are that Sam is coming back. But when? The kid’s duffel bag has been sitting in Shane’s van since the last day Sam came up to play. A good day on the court, for Sam, and the kid made Shane look terrible. It happens sometimes. If Sam is really on his game, things can get difficult fast. The kid’s trademark move starts on the right side, he crouches down a little bit with some phantom stomach cramp while his gold chain sways slightly in a hypnotizing side to side, and then he explodes like a piece of popcorn, flying either straight to baseline or across your face into the middle. The crossover is the worst. He’s on your left and then he’s on your right, an electric current jumping the gap. Ducks his head, tucks the ball into his chest and takes the two long strides and jumps. Let’s say you’ve managed to stay with him but now it’s the jump that kills you, he’s just rising and rising, cruising around like some Broadway Peter Pan. Sometimes Shane feels as if there are secret mini-trampolines hidden around the court and only Sam knows where they are.

It worked out that Shane had to cover him three times that day, and on a day like that Shane hated covering him. The kid was kid no longer, the gym made sure of that. Sam and Shane, grunting against machines—they both want something, they both want bigger and better. And although Shane the grizzled all-around working man can still usually win the wrestling matches under the basket, on Sam’s good days it doesn’t matter. Those days make Shane a bad person. He feels like grandpa out there, grabbing the kid’s shirt and poking him in the ribs and hooking him and holding him and trying to tire him out. He did all the tricks that day, but it didn’t matter. Sam kept scoring, pulling fantastic rebounds, reaching over everyone’s head and snatching the ball from the air like a spinning coin. Smacked his hand against the backboard to leave it vibrating in his wake.

Shane couldn’t say anything to him during the game, getting worked like that made him so fucking mad. But that was just on the court. It never takes long afterwards for the murder in his head to stop. He remembers hissing every evil word he knows and then taking the deep breath, putting out a fist for the congratulatory bump.