American Masculine (10 page)

After Weston died, Shale spent the early years trying to remember the good things. The two state championships in Livingston at Park High, one first as a sophomore with Weston, then two years later as a senior with his own group, a band of runners, Indian-style, that averaged nearly ninety points a game. They took the title in what sportswriters still refer to as the greatest game in Montana history, a 99–97 double-overtime thriller in ‘85 at Montana State, the Brick Breeden Fieldhouse, the Max Worthington Arena, before a crowd of ten thousand.

Shale would take himself down inside the dream, chest pressed to the back of the seat, as he stared out the back of the bus. The postgame show was blaring over the loudspeaker, everyone still whooping and hollering. “We’re comin home!” the radio man yelled, “We’re coming home!” and from the wide back window Shale saw a line of cars miles long and lit up, snaking from the flat before Livingston all the way up the pass to Bozeman. Weston was back there, following him, alive. The dream of a dream, the Blackfeet and the Crow, and the Northern Cheyenne, the white boys, the enemies and the friends, the clean line of basketball walking them out toward skeletal hoops in the dead of winter, the hollow in their eyes lonely, but lovely in its way.

THEIR SHOOTING ARMS were in the air and they were hopeful, but Drake and Shale failed again and Shale took it hard, each new miss shaking the standard, the misses reminding him how difficult it is to recapture what’s been lost, perhaps impossible. On Drake’s fifth attempt he made the shot, Shale on his seventh. “I used to be a shooter,” Shale said.

“Oh well,” Drake said. “We can’t stop on that note.”

“All right,” Shale said, but he didn’t feel like going on.

They got in the car and Drake said, “Where to now?” again, and Shale looked over and said, “To the east side,” and even as they turned east on Wellesley and headed for Hilyard, the poor side, the black, seemingly desperate side of town, Shale knew they’d find plenty of good hoops and he felt at home coming this way. He and Weston played most of their lives with Indians in Montana, Crows and Cheyennes, Blackfeet, Assiniboine-Sioux; and most of their college and postcollege years they’d played with a black-white mix, mostly black with a little white; he’d been in gyms in L.A. when he was the only white boy there. More often than not in those years, Shale felt black himself, and mourning his brother he suspected some vast core of blackness in Weston when he considered Weston’s huge vertical and how he could defend and score. It was a joke both black and white kept alive: anyone that had moves or could jump out of the gym was black, no matter the skin color. Anyone that couldn’t was white.

A few blocks beyond Nevada on the east side of town the sky was still filled with snow and as they turned down a side street they found a country all its own, a basketball country with its own citizens—nearly every house had a hoop in the street, a multitude of tall metal structures from here to the vanishing point.

“Wow.” Drake’s mouth was open. “Shooter’s paradise.”

“I know,” said Shale.

Shale held Weston’s basketball in his hands, the smooth leather a feeling for which he never grew weary. “Strange,” Drake said.

“What?”

“Look at that.” He motioned to the nearest hoop. Little snow in the net, and little on the rim. And every hoop nearby the same. “People playing, even this late?” Drake ventured.

“Yep.” Shale stared down the street. “Turn the car off,” he said.

Drake did and Shale rolled down the window. “Hear that,” Shale said.

“I do,” said Drake. “Basketballs, bouncing.” “People laughing,” said Shale.

Drake started the engine and they drove past a small pickup game in the park, even now, past midnight, and saw in the side streets groups of two or three shooting, scoring, defending. “Unreal,” Drake said.

“Keep going,” said Shale, and they came to a dark street and when they positioned the car lights and turned off the engine all was quiet. Two baskets stood next to each other, side by side, not twenty feet apart. Even now, he could lose focus when thoughts of Weston came up. Bright-lit hoops. Behind and to the side only darkness.

They sat in the heat of the car and stared out. Shale was seventeen years old, alone in his tiny bedroom in the single-wide trailer in Livingston, warm under a weight of quilts as he thought of Weston, and home.

OUT IN THE NIGHT the snow falls and casts small shadows on the wall. In the main part of the trailer the woodstove burns. Shale is a senior at Park High. It is deep winter, a thin smell of smoke in the air, the sharp scent of pine faint through his window from the outside. He isn’t sleeping. He smells the oil of his hands in the leather of the basketball near his head. He’s too small, they say, Old Man Mitchell at the drugstore, Evans down at the school. Say he’ll never make it, but he doesn’t care. He’s just missing the rez, Northern Cheyenne, and he wishes he could bring it to Park High, or at least Lafe Haugen, or Russell Tallwhiteman, or Richard American Horse, or maybe Blake Walksnice with his little side push shot that hits the net in a fast pop because it flies on a straight line, lacking any arc.

Last time his dad discovered him he shook Shale by the shoulders, yelled at him, and grounded him to his bedroom for a week. He’s no match for his dad, but when Shale creeps to the living room, and draws back the curtain of the main window, and sees how pure the night is, how good and right the snow, inside him everything grows calm. On such a night, he has to go. Weston is thirty miles away in Bozeman at MSU, playing for the Bobcats. He wishes Weston was here. The snow is endless, the flakes big and white. A sparkling wedge of frost fills the lower left corner of the windowpane. The rusted out Chevelle is in the drive outside the trailer.

The trailers are dark rectangular boxes in two long rows. Shale drives south on an open roadway soft with fallen snow. Above him in the distance the freeway carries fast-moving cars, frontlit with fans of light, and he wonders where they are going. He passes beneath them toward the city’s heart as he carves clean wheel lines all the way to E Street, to the sheriff’s station and the schoolyard. He turns into the playground and drives slowly over the virgin snow. He trains the headlights on the rim. He parks the car. With his foot he clicks the high beams and everything is so brilliant he shudders.

At Eastside, both low end and high end have square metal backboards marked by quarter-sized holes to keep the wind from knocking the baskets down. Livingston is the fifth-windiest city in the world. The playground has a slant to it that makes one basket lower than the other. The low end is nine feet ten inches high, and they all come here to throw down in the summer. Too small, they say, but they don’t know. Inside outside, between the legs, behind the back, cross it up, skip to my lou, fake and go, doesn’t matter, any of these lose the defender. Then Shale rises up and throws down. Shale and the other ballers rigged a breakaway on the rim, and because of the way they hang on it in the summer, their hands get thick and tough. They can all dunk now, so the breakaway is a necessity, a spring-loaded rim made to handle the power of power dunks. It came into being after Darrel Dawkins, nicknamed Chocolate Thunder, broke two of the big glass backboards in the NBA. On the first one Dawkins’s force was so immense the glass caved in and fell out the back of the frame; on the second, the glass exploded and everyone ducked their heads and ran to avoid the shards that flew from one end of the court to the other. Within two years every high school in the nation had breakaways, and Shale and his friends convinced their assistant coach to give them one so they could put it up on the low end at Eastside.

The high end is the shooter’s end, made for the pure shooter, a silver ring ten feet two inches high with a long white net. Tonight the car lights bring it alive, rim and backboard like an industrial artwork, everything mounted on a steel-gray pole that stems down into the snow and concrete, down deep into the wintry hard soil. The snow has fallen for hours, plush and white, and in the Chevelle’s light the snowflakes gather like small bright stars.

Shale leaves the lights on, cuts the engine, and grabs his basketball from the heat in the passenger foot space. He steps out. The air is crisp. The wind carries the cold, dry smell of winter trees, and farther down, more faint, the smell of roots, the smell of earth. Out over the city, white clouds blanket everything. The night is Shale’s sanctuary, snow falling softer and deeper as it covers him and captures the whole world.

This is where it begins, the movements and the whisperings that are his dreams. Into the lamplight the shadows strike, separate and sharp, like spirits, like angels. He’s practiced here alone so often since Weston left for college he no longer knows the hours he’s played. He calls the shadows by name, the great native basketball legends, some his own contemporaries, some who came before. He learns from them and receives the river, their fluidity, their confidence, like the Yellowstone River seven blocks south, dark and wide, stronger than the city it surrounds, perfect in form where it moves and speaks now, bound by snow. If he listens his heroes lift him out away from here, fly him farther than they flew themselves. In Montana, young men are Indian and they are white, loving, hating. At Plenty Coups on the Crow Reservation, at St. Labre on the Northern Cheyenne, Shale was afraid at first. But now he sees. The speaking and the listening, the welcoming: Tim Falls Down, Marty Round Face, and Max and Marc (Luke) Spotted Bear at Plenty Coups; Joe Pretty Paint at Lodge Grass; and at St. Labre, Stanford Rides Horse, Juneau Plenty Hawk, and Paul and Georgie Wolf Robe. All he loved, all he watched with wonder—and none got free.

Most played ball for his father, a few for rival teams. Some Shale watched as a child, and he loved the wild precision of their moves. Some he grew up playing against. And some he merely heard of in basketball circles years later, the rumble of their greatness, the stories of games won or lost on last-second shots.

Falls Down was buried at eighteen in buckskin, beads, and full headdress, his varsity uniform, turquoise and orange, laid over his chest: dead at high speed when his truck slid from an ice-bound bridge into the river.

Paul Wolf Robe was shot in the heart with a large caliber pistol at a party near St. Xavier.

Pretty Paint died before he was twenty-five, another alcohol-laced car wreck.

Marty Round Face, dead. A suicide, Shale remembers. By knife or rope or gun, he can’t recall.

There are these and many more. “Too many,” say the middle-aged warriors, the old Indians, “too young.” They motion with their hands as if they pull from a bottle. With their lips they gesture. They spit on the ground. Some of those who died held Shale in their hands when he was a boy, when they were young men. He remembers their faces, their hair like wind, cheekbones the push of mountains, and silvery humor ever-present in their eyes.

And of the living and the dead, two above the rest: Elvis Old Bull and Jonathan Takes Enemy, at Lodge Grass, at Hardin. They were players in the eighties, and Shale with them. Elvis was three-time MVP of the state tournament: ambidextrous, master passer, prolific scorer. And of Takes Enemy it was said he ran with horses when he ran the hardwood. Hardin High was winless the year before he came, but playing point and shooting guard over the course of four years he created a powerhouse. The people followed him in big yellow buses, the old men speaking his name in a whisper, the grandmothers in native dress muttering hexes to his foes.

Shale stares at the rim; the high beams have made everything new.

Atop the rim the snow has settled in a soft white circle.

DRAKE AND SHALE, DOWN in the dark of the city, two hoops lit by the lights of the Grand Cherokee. “This is it,” Drake said.

“Yes,” said Shale. The nets had collected snow for hours; over each rim a band of snow had formed, six or eight inches high. The street was luminous, the architecture of each hoop in stark relief, angles of metal covered in white, everything sparkling of winter and light.

It was 1:00 a.m.

“Let’s make this the last,” Shale said. “Agreed,” said Drake.

They got out, quietly closed their car doors, and moved into position, each of them a step farther back than normal. Twenty-seven feet. Thirty. The NBA line is twenty-three feet nine inches, thought Shale. The message is like an echo in his mind, only one shot at the game winner. In the title game his senior year he’d scored thirty-nine points, fourteen of those in the two overtimes, and they’d won in the closing seconds, the gym noise like an inferno. His brother had met him in the parking lot when the bus got back to Park High, and they went home and stayed up the whole night and laughed together and talked hoops. Shale remembered the team he played pro ball for in Germany two years after Weston died. In an old small gym in Düsseldorf with four seconds on the clock they were down one point when he missed the two free throws they needed to get to the play-offs. Freak accident, Shale thought, like Weston’s death. He blamed himself. Of all shots, how do you miss those? Brakes, engine failure, something. The car was so beat up, they never found the answer.

Drake and Shale were in unison, the rhythm step, the gather, one shot reflecting the other, the arc of each ball smooth in the air like a crescent moon—and each follow-through a small cathedral, the correct push and the floppy wrist, the proper backspin, the arm held high, the night, the ball, the basket, everything illumined.

THE NET IS LONG and white, even thicker than he’d hoped, leaden with snow. He’s back at Eastside, young, vibrant, Weston a short drive away, and Shale has trained for this moment, ten hours a day the summer leading up to his senior season, eight hours the summer before, for the state title, yes, but more for moments like these, to rise with Falls Down and Pretty Paint, with Roundface and Old Bull and Takes Enemy: to shoot the jump shot, and feel the follow-through that lifts and finds the rhythm, the sound, the sweetness of the ball on a solitary arc in darkness as the ball falls and finds its way.

For Shale every shot is a form of gratitude, especially a shot like this. He had so wanted to play with Weston at Montana State and all the hours have paid off, the letter of intent signed a few weeks ago after winning the state title. He and Weston will room together, everything now in preparation for what lies ahead, the huge college arenas, the national exposure as Shale runs the break with Weston on the wing, the confidence Shale will need to do well under pressure. Walking toward the court he holds the ball and says aloud: