Basketball Gods: A Short Story Page 3
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Something you should know about my brother is that in the last year, he’s worked in an office supply store, a sporting goods store, and he waited tables for a few weeks at one of those restaurants where they make their employees wear Hawaiian shirts for no apparent reason. What I’m trying to say is, his first two months as a paramedic were his only two months as a paramedic. Danny told me that he’d beat a man’s chest for fifteen miles of highway while his partner drove eighty to the hospital on White Feather Road. As they pulled into the parking lot, he had to close the man’s mouth and eyes with his fingertips. Most recently, Danny quit a job delivering and assembling futons and waterbeds after three days of employment because an opportunity to work at the local Boy’s and Girl’s Club became available, the same job he held during high school. I should’ve known as soon as we got in his truck where it would take us.
“Can you believe I’m back here?” he asked, unlocking an equipment closet in the corner of the large, rectangular basketball gym. From the closet, he pulled a metal rack that held five indoor/outdoor basketballs and a smaller red rubber dodge ball.
Something you should know about me is that after all those accelerated courses I graduated college at nineteen and shortly thereafter accepted a position bagging groceries at the store closest to my home, where I’d received three promotions in four years and opened the bakery five mornings a week. I didn’t know what to do with my life when I was nineteen, and I still didn’t know four years later, but I made my bills every month and that was one thing I didn’t have to worry about. So I was a baker.
The gym was the same as it had always been. There was a full court and three hoops along each of court’s long sides. When school let out each weekday, dozens of kids filed in and shot on all eight baskets, and the sound of dribbling basketballs and errant bank shots echoed so loudly within the gym that you didn’t hear it anymore after a few minutes. Danny flicked me a ball, hard enough that it snapped against my palms when I caught it, stinging my fingertips. He removed another from the rack for himself and we shot around for a while before settling into a game of “Horse.” I hadn’t touched a basketball in years, and Danny beat me pretty easily. He was nice about it, admitting that he’d been playing in a men’s night league for a month or so. He beat me a second time, but it was closer; I’d gotten the letters “h,” “o,” and “r” before losing. I was beginning to find my rhythm, discovering what had stayed with me and what I could no longer do. It was four-thirty in the morning, but neither of us seemed tired anymore. When my brother challenged me to a game of one-on-one, I just nodded my head as if we were teenagers again.
One-on-one and “Horse” are a lot different in terms of strategy and game play. In “Horse,” a shoot around game, you can get lucky and sink a shot that your opponent finds difficult to replicate. More often, you can miss an easy one when it’s your turn to match, for no reason other than the basketball gods looking the other way as you let go of the ball. One-on-one – for my brother and I – was simply two guys, a ball, a hoop, and a race to eleven. Winner got the ball, and you had to win by two, meaning you kept the ball after you scored, and the game couldn’t be won by a single point—you had to keep going until a definitive winner emerged. That night, in the gym where he worked shooting baskets with kids all day, on the court he hustled up and down Tuesday and Thursday evenings with the 21-and-overs, I was up on my older brother 10-8 in less than half an hour, and it was my ball.
Danny and I hadn’t changed as much as I’d thought since the last time we’d played basketball together; we were just older, not as optimistic as we had once been. Playing against him again was strange, as if I’d traveled through time surveying all the events of my life, and upon returning to where I belonged, the only confusing thing was that I was holding a basketball, synthetic leather sticking to my hot hands as if something from the past had mistakenly come back with me. I checked the ball to my brother and felt the late hour all at once when he checked it back. Suddenly, I knew I wanted nothing in the world as much as I wanted my brother to score the points he needed to win while I just sat and watched, so he could drive me home and I could sleep for a very long time.