Pick-Up Game Read online

  Fish brought the ball down and ran LD into a hellacious pick. He came down the lane and threw up a soft hook that I slapped away. Ronnie got the ball, but Waco slapped it away from him, recovered, and took a dribble. He had dipped his shoulders on the dribble, and I knew he wanted to slam over me.

  Street ball. No blood? No foul!

  I went up with Waco and brought my body into his as hard as I could. He hung on to the ball, took the impact, and then let it go. Off the backboard, around the rim once, twice, and then drop through. They were two baskets away from the game.

  Then it came to me, like one of those times you’re not even thinking and your whole body kind of shakes. My grandmother used to say that when that happened, a rabbit had jumped over your grave. That was how the thought came to me. It wasn’t about the money, or even the run; for some reason Fish had brought me to Waco. Me and Waco was what this was about.

  Earl lost the ball, and they scored again. Ronnie was desperately trying to talk us back into the game.

  “I put the money up, and I ain’t no charity, dudes,” he kept saying. “I ain’t no charity.”

  Ronnie and I hooked up on a give-and-go and he scored, but they only needed one more basket.

  Fish was taking the ball out, and Waco came running downcourt. I stopped him with a hand flat against his chest. He stopped and looked toward me. His eyes were so dead-looking I thought he might have been looking at somebody on the street because he wasn’t focused on my face at all.

  He turned at midcourt and looked toward where Fish had just started his dribble. LD picked Fish up at three-quarter court, but I knew Fish could handle the ball. Waco didn’t move until Fish had passed us and we both turned.

  Waco ran me into a brush with Marcus and then another with Flyer, but I still stayed with him. The ball went inside, and for a moment, I thought Flyer was going to try the last shot but he didn’t even look toward the hoop. Instead he made a bounce pass out to Fish.

  “You gotta win by two buckets! You gotta win by two buckets!” Earl was screaming. Keep hope alive.

  Fish in the corner with Jamal all over him. He put up a high, arcing shot, which bounced off the rim, off the backboard, into the hot July air, black against the blue of the downtown sky. Then it was me going up, and Ronnie going up, and this incredibly white hand, fingers straining, reaching for the ball, reaching. Me spreading my legs, waiting for Waco to grab the ball and come down, waiting to get all over his white ass, and then seeing him turn his hand and push the ball up as we all came down, watching it hit the backboard as I hit the ground, watching it roll around the rim, watching it fall through. Watching it fall through. Game over. Time to sit down.

  “Why don’t you hang around?” This from Fish.

  “Nah,” I said. “Got some things to do.”

  He shrugged and turned away. No easy Fish chatter. No quick Fish mouth.

  I felt a little sick to my stomach and told myself it was from the heat. I took a squat against the fence and took a sip of warm soda as some guys started the usual argument about who was running next.

  “Hey, why don’t you guys wait around and play it back?” Waco was by my side. I looked up at him. His eyes still looked dark, vacant. The thought of his breath made me feel cold as we stood there in the rising West 4th Street heat. I realized I was looking away from him, but I didn’t want to look him in the face.

  “You got all my money,” I said, trying to force a smile.

  “No problem,” Waco said. “You can owe me.”

  “I don’t think so,” I answered. “I don’t think so.”

  “Fish said they play some hellacious ball in Harlem,” he went on. “He said they got guys up there whose whole life is their game. I’d love to play up there.”

  “I guess he knows what he’s talking about,” I said, turning away.

  Me and Earl left; the rest of the guys hung for another run. On the way home, Earl said he thought we should have won the game, that they had gotten lucky.

  I didn’t answer Earl. As I hit the uptown A, I was thinking about Waco’s remark that for some guys in Harlem, basketball was their whole life. And about him wanting a piece of that action.

  “Ay, Water Man, who got next?”

  “Oh, no, you ain’t getting me in with that mess. Y’all be about to kill a brutha over who running next.”

  “I’m just saying yo, you been here for a minute, so I figured —”

  “You figured wrong, playa. But if you wanna find out, go ask them cats.”

  “Serious? Yao Ming and Bruce Lee?”

  “You asked.”

  “Mannn, when did THAT happen? Where all the bruthas at?”

  “Don’t you watch the league, playa? The game done gone inta-national.”

  As KaySaan watched the second game, score now 4–3 Skins, he became aware that his head was swiveling with unexpected regularity: left-right, right-left, left-right . . . I might as well be watching Ping-Pong, he thought, Ping-Pong played by slow amateurs, not those frantic Asians who stand twenty feet back and blister the ball so it’s a white streak. Yes: the five men (plus basketball) moving in one direction can be seen as a spatial and even temporal unit (the serve); then, after between five and seven seconds, the other five (plus ball) move the other way at almost exactly the same speed (the return). The details, to KaySaan, were not very interesting. Whether one unit spent its five seconds in the offensive zone combining a pick, two passes, and a reverse layup or spent its five seconds doing lots of dribbling before heaving up a woeful jump shot mattered not to KaySaan as much as the pattern.

  Score now 7–5, the team with two white boys ahead. KaySaan heaved a sigh. In about eight minutes — longer if there were more woeful jump shots clanging awry — he would have to tighten his shoes, replace his round metal real-life spectacles with his plastic Sportz Lenz goggles (which could only improve his vision to 20/60, but did anyone ever consider that when you missed a four-foot hook shot? One might be six ten, but one still needed to see what one shot at.), and step onto the court.

  Someone slapped him above his right elbow. He looked down at the eager face of one of his brothers. “You see that block-out?” said HanNoy, pointing with his chin. “See how that big white thing moved his feet?”

  “No,” said KaySaan. “I didn’t see his feet.”

  “To get your tall butt into position, you don’t just leeeeean,” said his brother, nudging him hard — and, one could guess, ineffectively — with his shoulder. “You move your wheels. Move your wheels, boy, and your tall-ass self follows.”

  “Wheels,” said KaySaan, looking back at the court with new interest. Yes, the back-forth thing worked if you thought of each unit of five as a great wheel, rolling one way, hitting a wall, then rolling the other way. Wheels, five into one. Mildly interesting.

  “Two buckets for Skins and we go,” said HanNoy.

  Approximately three minutes later, they went. KaySaan walked to the middle of the court and stood there as if waiting. In fact, actually waiting. CyGonn, his other brother, grabbed his left arm above the elbow and yanked.

  “No jump ball out here, fool. Can’t you remember for one whole week?”

  “I like the jump ball,” said KaySaan, getting dragged into one half of the court. “It’s interesting. If you wait until you see the ball hang for the tenth of a second — or perhaps an even briefer moment — in which it actually stops, then —”

  “This isn’t about interesting, Kay. This is hoops. No money in the game, but you got to still think.”

  CyGonn pushed him into place, next to the taller white guy from the first two games. The white guy was a few inches less tall than Kay, but the expression on his face — Stick your hands anywhere near me and I will eat them right off your arms — added a good foot to him.

  “Hi,” KaySaan said to the white guy, just to, you know, fill an interlude. “I guess you like basketball.”

  HanNoy, holding the ball at the foul line, turned and said over his shoulder, “Ju
st stay between him and the hoop. And get your hands up.”

  Kay raised his arms. Han bounced the ball to a fidgety black kid, who immediately lofted it to Kay’s guy, who spun to his left around Kay and banked in a layup.

  “Don’t stand there like a streetlight. Get upcourt!”

  “Right!” KaySaan trotted to the other end. By the time he got there, Cy was on his heels, dribbling the ball.

  “Low! Go low!”

  Obedient, Kay crouched. Cy groaned and passed to his friend Tweet, a straight one-handed pass off the dribble quicker than an idea, quicker than a sneeze. But Tweet rushed his right-handed push, and the ball, looking suddenly sort of stumpy, with no grace at all, ponged off the front rim. It ponged right to Kay, barely rotating, which was possibly intriguing. But ignoring this rotation business, Kay surprised himself and shot it back up, two-handed (unconsciously imparting, he noted, lots of backspin). The ball crept over the front rim and through the designated hoop.

  “Look in your pocket, you find a twenty,” said a guy on the other team. Kay started to put his hand — then he got the joke. Jogging back, he told the kid, “You’re right. I was lucky. But you know, the chance incidence of —”

  The fidgety guy guarded by Han passed once more to Kay’s man. Kay jumped to a spot between him and the basket and raised his hands. Instead of eating them, the kid took one step back and jumped and shot. Kay heard the ball pass with a ching through the chain net.

  “Stick close, fool!”

  So it went, back and forth.

  KaySaan genuinely tried to concentrate. No: in fact, he did concentrate. For example, he counted the number of dribbles each person took, figured an average, and wondered, but only briefly, why a person’s height was inversely proportional to his urge to pump the ball against the concrete; e.g., the smallest guy on the other team averaged fourteen dribbles every time he possessed the ball, the tall white kid only 1.5. If figuring all of that didn’t take focus, what did? Trouble was, paying attention did not tell him what to do. His brothers told him what to do, and he appreciated their assistance, but, well, none of his tasks was very interesting, so he could not come to care very much. This was the ninth straight Saturday of giving his best (nine Saturdays not spent reading the expensive science magazines at the library or plotting the developing swimming skills of the recently born female walrus at the New York Aquarium or continuing his three-year [so far] project to sketch every gargoyle he could spot in Manhattan), and he had made little progress.

  At least he was at last doing what his brothers had been begging him to do since he topped six feet in the sixth grade (early in the sixth grade). The twins were three years older than he was but had stood five eleven this spring at graduation. As far back as Kay could remember (pretty far back — he recalled the taste of the infamous cherry-vanilla cake his mom had attempted for his second birthday), Han and Cy had seemed to love basketball above all things. His pops had supported this happy fanaticism. When Kay started zooming up around age eight, all three of them tried to jolly along in him what they believed simply must be a profound predilection for the game. I mean, if God gives you the gift of great height, how can He withhold a mania for hoops? What else would He make you a giant for?

  Through a few years of disbelief becoming frustration becoming resignation, his brothers had never turned mean on him: deep down they could tell he was simply the city’s tallest book nerd. His father’s disappointment was rougher; the man could never convince himself entirely that in Kay’s lack of enthusiasm for basketball against his own passion for it.

  It seemed there was a lot of mistaken thinking that could be undone just by the simple gesture of participation. So — with the proviso that he might never be any good — Kay started going with them to the courts. That first Saturday, he was not aware of having contributed anything to what turned out to be a marginal success. The game whizzed and bounced around him. He did not find even an ingress for thought. For the last four games of the day, he was commanded simply to stand with his hands up in a particular spot at each end of the court. Twice, driving opponents twisted close, threw up shots, and the ball hit his arms unbidden. Passive arboreal defense, he thought.

  That first week, they won a few. His brothers were huge in happiness. Their general giddiness included much mild, sardonic gratitude for Kay’s willingness. And week after week, they kept asking him back.

  He hoped they liked memories, because today this first game was fast running away from them. Kay, who was never certain whether a basket counted one or two (it changed from game to game, did it not?), had lost track of the score, but the trend seemed to be that the other guys scored almost every time they had the ball, while Kay’s brothers did not.

  Kay found his thinking drawn more and more into the scheme of basketball. For instance: In what ways did the rule of alternating ball-possession establish the rhythm of competition? Did knowing you would get a chance to score as soon as your opponents scored cause an unconscious relaxation of the desire to stop them? Something like, Oh, well, at least we get our shot now. If hoops operated the way Ping-Pong or volleyball did — keep serving as long as you win the points — would defense be a more desperate affair, balanced between the need to break the other guys’ momentum and the temptation of despair as the juggernaut kept rolling? For three trips down the court, Kay conducted a mental experiment — easy because the rules of the game had not worn grooves in his soul or his brain — in which he banished the idea that a bucket by the bad guys merely opened an opportunity for his own offensive fun. If they score, we don’t get to touch the ball, he gnawed to himself.

  For the first defensive spell, Kay thrust himself much closer to his man, moving his feet as his man dribbled to the right, then to the left to stay thick between the ball and the basket behind. His man, looking a bit peevish, passed to a teammate who missed a long jump shot.

  Next time down the court, he pressed even closer even earlier — no sooner had the tall white guy crossed half court than Kay jumped in his face. Very annoyed was the guy, especially when Kay started waving his arms. Nobody passed the ball his way; nobody even looked.

  Third time, Kay chest-bumped him, and the guy missed a bounce pass from the point.

  Kay concluded that facing no prospect of readily getting the ball indeed made one hungrier for a stop.

  He did not get time to cogitate on this, however. Dribbling deliberately upcourt, the guy called Zeke announced, “One more and you tools walk.”

  Kay looked for interpretation to his brothers. Their faces said it all: no brightness, no tension; they were about to lose.

  Something stirred in KaySaan’s chest.

  Two passes took the ball to a rugged black kid behind Kay. The kid dribbled once, gathered himself, and sprang toward the rim, extending the ball gracefully in his lead hand, unfurling his fingers to let the ball roll, natural as water downhill, through the hoop.

  As if watching someone else, Kay took a bound toward the shooter, stretched his arm cleanly over the kid’s head from behind, and, with his own equally graceful fingertips, flicked the ball. This lightest of touches was enough: the ball dinked off the rim, Kay gathered it in, and, looking upcourt, flipped a baseball-throw past an unbelieving Cy. Cy ran the ball down and made a layup. Kay was barely aware of himself. The touch! The backspin of the ball as it left the shooter’s hand, the tiny mechanisms of his digital tendons following a command his brain hardly knew how to give, the corrective nudge that broke the shot’s course! This was, this was — not exactly physics; no, there was obviously some neurology worked in, but, jeez, this was a new science. Kay blocked the next three shots his opponents took: two rash ones from within ten feet of the basket, and one telegraphed heave from what he believed his brothers called downtown.

  At last he was learning something. Some spatial calculus without words, unlike anything else he knew — but, hey, experience was turning into insight somewhere deep in there. The littler white guy dribbled off the top of his foot w
hen Kay waved an arm in his direction. Tweet hit a jump shot. Cy and Han stood a bit straighter.

  Then Kay’s man, responsibility for whom belonged only to the previous incarnation of he who had become KaySaan the Wonder Man, snatched a pass, roared as he rose, and slashed the ball through the hoop with both hands. Game over.

  Cy and Han each took one of Kay’s elbows and pulled him off the court. He amazed them no less than himself by resisting. “But —” he said. “But —”

  “Was cool to see you wake up a little and get big,” said Han. “But they beat us.”

  “But it’s getting interesting,” Kay said. “See, from the angle of the elbow, you can anticipate the trajectory —”

  “Over for now, man.”

  They reached the sideline. Kay watched another fivesome step onto the court.

  He wrenched his arms free. “No!” he said. “I’m starting to get it! I want to —”

  “Hey, stick,” said a stocky black kid who had walked onto the court. He looked straight at KaySaan; the brothers dropped away. “If you want to, like, keep playing, you can step out with us.”

  Kay looked. A kid who had gone out, maybe six five, was now slinking toward the sideline, shooting a low look of death at Kay. “What?” Kay said.

  “Play like you just played, we get some propers,” said the stocky guy. He tossed his chin at the slinking kid.

  “He OK with it. He only out here to impress his sister’s friend, and he so bad, he won’t do that.”

  KaySaan found his brothers’ eyes. “How long before we get back on the court?” he said.

  They looked around. A crowd. Ballers. Cy shrugged.

  “Two hours, maybe three,” he said. He looked at Han, and they nodded. “Do what you do,” he said. “We’ll be here.”

  Kay stretched up high, then reached down and pulled up his socks.

  “OK,” he told the stocky kid. “Let’s play.”