“Somebody give Oh Shit a sedative!” shouted Double O from the floor. “The Old Indian has gone spastic!”
Still whooping with joy, Frank helped Double O to his feet. The old man and the young man hugged each other and laughed.
“I beat you,” Frank said.
“Old man,” said Double O, “you gave me a trip on your time machine.”
If smell is the memory sense, as Frank once read, then he was most nostalgic about the spicy aroma of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Whenever Frank smelled Kentucky Fried Chicken, and not just any fried chicken but the very particular and chemical scent of the Colonel’s secret recipe, he thought of his mother. Because he was a child who could not separate his memories of his mother and his father and sometimes confused their details, Frank thought of his mother and father together. And when he thought about his mother and father and the smell of Kentucky Fried Chicken, Frank remembered one summer day when his parents took him to the neighborhood park to picnic with a twenty-piece bucket of mixed Kentucky Fried Chicken, and a ten-piece box of legs and wings only, along with a cooler filled with Diet Pepsi and store-bought potato salad and apples and bananas and potato chips and a chocolate cake. Harrison and Frank had fought over which particular basketball to bring, but they had at last agreed on an ABA red-white-and-blue rock.
“Can’t you ever leave that ball at home?” Helen asked Harrison. She always asked him that question. After so many years of hard-worked marriage, that question had come to mean
I love you, but your obsessions irritate the hell out of me, but I love you, remember that, okay?
On that day, Frank was eleven years old, young enough to sit on his mother’s lap and be only slightly embarrassed by their shared affection, and old enough to need his father and be completely unable to tell him about that need.
“Let’s play ball,” Frank said to Harrison, though he meant to say,
Prove your love for me.
“Eat first,” Helen said.
“If I eat now, I’ll throw up,” Frank said. “I’ll eat after we play.”
“You’ll eat now, and if you throw up, you’ll just have to eat again, and then you’ll play again, and then you’ll throw up, so you’ll have to eat again. It might go on for days that way. You’ll be trapped in a vicious circle.”
“You’re weird, Mom.”
“Yes, I am,” she said. “And weirdness is hereditary.”
“I’m weird, too,” Harrison said. “So you got it coming from both sides. You don’t have a chance.”
“I can’t believe you’re my parents. Did you adopt me?”
“Honey, we certainly did not adopt you,” Helen said. “We stole you from a pack of wolves, so eat your meat, you darling little carnivore.”
Laughing, feeling like an adult because his parents treated him with respect and satire, Frank sat between his mother and father and almost cried with happiness. His chest tightened, and his mouth tasted bitter. He cried too easily, he knew, and sometimes had to fight school-yard bullies who teased him about his quick tears. He usually won the fights and usually cried about his victory.
Sitting with his parents, Frank closed his eyes against his tears, blinked and blinked and thought of the utter hilarity of a dog farting in its sleep, and that made him laugh a little. Soon enough, he felt normal, like a kid made of steel and oak, and he could breathe easily, and he quickly ate his lunch of Kentucky Fried Chicken, but only wings and legs.
“Okay, I’m done,” he said. “Let’s play ball, Dad.”
“I’m too tired,” Harrison said. “I’m going to lie down in the grass and fall asleep in some dog poop.”
His father was always trying to be funny. He was funny sometimes, maybe most of the time, but nobody could be funny all of the time. And being funny was sometimes a way of being dishonest.
A few years back, Harrison had told Frank’s third-grade teacher that Indians didn’t believe in using numbers, that the science of mathematics was a colonial evil.
“Well,” the mystified teacher had asked, “then how do Indians count?”
“We guess,” Harrison had said with as much profundity as he could fake.
Okay, so maybe Harrison was funny because funny was valuable. Maybe being funny was usually a way of being honest.
“Come on, let’s play ball,” Frank pleaded with his father, who had flopped onto the grass with a chicken leg and a banana.
“I’m going to eat and sleep and fart,” Harrison said.
“Dad, you said you’d show me something new.”
“Did I promise you I would show you something new?”
“Well, no.”
“Did I sign something that said I would show you something new?”
“No.”
“That means we don’t have an oral or written contract. We don’t have an implied contract, either, because you don’t even know how to spell ‘implication.’ So that means I’m going to eat chicken until I pass out from a grease overdose.”
“Mom, he’s talking like a lawyer again.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I hate it when he does that.”
“And I can, too, spell ‘implication,’” Frank said.
“Okay,” Harrison said. “If you can spell ‘implication,’ your mother will play ball with you.”
“I don’t want to play ball with Mom, I want to play with somebody good.”
“Hey, your mom is great. Why do you think I fell in love with her?”
“Mom, he’s lying again.”
“I’m not lying. Our dear Helen was a cannibal on the basketball court.”
“Is that true, Mom?”
“I used to play,” she said.
Frank looked at his mother. Sure, she was tall (five feet eight or so, the same height as Harrison), and she was strong (she grew up bucking hay bales), but Frank had never seen her touch a basketball except to toss it in a closet or down the stairs or into a room or out the door, or anywhere to get that dang thing out of her way.
“Mom, are you lying?”
“Have I ever lied to you?”
“You told me I was raised by wolves.”
“Okay, have I ever lied to you twice in one day?”
“Mom, be serious.”
“She is being serious,” Harrison said. “She used to play those girls’ rules. Three girls on defense, three on offense. Your mom was the shooter. Damn, I saw her score fifty-two points once. And then the coaches decided to play boys’ rules. They didn’t have to, but they wanted to see what your mom could do in a real game. And she scored seventy-three. I missed that one. If I’d seen that game, I would have proposed to her on the spot.”
“I love you, too, sweetie,” Helen said to her husband.
Frank couldn’t believe it. He looked at his mother in her denim skirt and frilly blue top, with her lipstick and her beaded earrings and her scarf all matching perfectly, all of her life and spirit and world color-coordinated and alphabetically organized. How could his mother, who washed her hands twelve times a day, ever have played a game so fundamentally sweaty and messy?
“Mom, did you really play ball?”
“It was girls’ basketball,” she said, “so it doesn’t really count.”
She was being sarcastic, Frank knew, because she’d taught him how to be sarcastic.
“For the rest of your academic life,” she’d told him on his first day of kindergarten, “whenever any teacher tells you that Columbus discovered America, I want you to run up to him or her, jump on his or her back, and scream, ‘I discovered you!’”
He’d never been courageous enough to do it, but he always considered it. He always almost did it. He almost always ran home and told Helen how close he’d been to doing it, how he was sure he could do it the next time, and she hugged him and told him how smart and good and handsome he was. Helen was loving and crazy and unpredictable and gentle and voluble and bitter and funny and a thousand other good and bad and indefinable things, but she was certainly not a liar.
“Are you telling the truth?” Frank asked her. “Were you really a good basketball player?”
“People said I was good,” she said and shrugged. “If enough people say you’re good at something, then you’re probably good at it.”
“Okay, cool,” Frank said. “Do you want to play ball with me?”
“Remember, you have to spell ‘implication’ first,” Harrison said.
“It’s spelled ‘D-A-D I-S A J-E-R-K,’” Frank said.
All three of them laughed. They were always laughing. That was what people said about the Snake Churches. People said the Snake Churches were good at laughing.
“Okay, okay,” Helen said. “Let’s play ball. But I’m not making any guarantees. It’s been a long time.”
So mother and son took to the court and played basketball. At first, she practiced shots while he rebounded her makes and misses and passed the ball back to her. She had a funny shot, a one-handed push, and she missed the first ten or twelve before her body remembered the game, and then she rarely missed. From ten feet away, then fifteen, then twenty, and twenty-five feet, she shot and made it and shot and made it and shot and made it and shot and missed it and then shot and made it and shot and made it and shot many times and made many more than she missed.
“Wow,” Frank said to his mother as she shot. He kept saying it. It was all he could think to say. This was a new ceremony for them, for this mother and son. They’d created and shared other ceremonies. They baked cookies together; they told stories to each other at night; they made up love songs while she drove him to school; they gave silly nicknames to strangers in shopping malls; they made up stupid knock-knock jokes and laughed until milk sprayed out of their noses. But they’d never played a sport together, had never been this physical, this strong and competitive. Frank looked at his mother, and he saw a new woman, a different person, a mysterious stranger, and a romantic figure.
“Mom,” Frank said. “You’re a ballplayer.”
Oh man, he loved her, and he felt like crying yet again. Oh, he was young and worshipful and sentimental, and he didn’t know it, but his mother would always want her son to be young and worshipful and sentimental. She prayed that the world, filled with its cruel people and crueler philosophies, would not punish her son too harshly for being so kind and so receptive to kindness.
“Mom,” Frank said. “Show me something new.”
So Helen dribbled the ball toward the hoop, dribbled across the key, and shot a rolling left-handed hook that bounced around the rim and dropped in.
“Oh, sweetie! I love you!” Harrison shouted from the grass and sprayed chicken and banana into the air. “That was her favorite move, son, she never missed that one! And nobody ever stopped it. Hell, I never stopped it!”
“Do it again,” Frank said.
So Helen shot the left-handed hook again. She shot it twenty times and made nineteen of them.
“She’s beautiful!” Harrison shouted and ran to join his wife and son on the court. “Isn’t she beautiful?”
Frank wondered if this was the best day of his whole life so far, if he would ever be this happy again. Those were extreme thoughts for an eleven-year-old, and Frank, though he was that eleven-year-old, understood he was being extreme, but it was the only way he knew how to be. It was the only way he’d been taught to be.
So mother, father, and son played basketball for hours, until it got dark enough for the streetlights to blink on, until it was too dark for even the streetlights to make any difference, until Frank could barely keep his eyes open, until Helen and Harrison took their exhausted son home and put him to bed and watched him sleep and breathe, and inhale and exhale and inhale and exhale.
On the first anniversary of his father’s death, Frank stepped outside to see what kind of day it was. He cursed the rain, stepped back inside to grab his windbreaker, and walked to the covered courts over on Rainier Avenue. On a sunny day, fifty guys played at Rainier, but on that rainy day, Preacher was shooting hoops all by himself; he was always shooting hoops by himself. Two or three hundred set shots a day. One day a month, he closed his eyes and shot blindly and would never reveal why he performed such an eccentric ceremony.
“Honey, honey, honey,” Preacher always said when asked. “Just let the mystery be.”
On that day, Preacher’s eyes were wide open when Frank joined him for a game of Horse.
“Hey, Frank Snake Church, what ever happened to you?” Preacher asked. He always asked variations of the same question when he saw Frank. “Tell me, tell me, tell me, what ever happened to Frank Snake Church, what the hell happened to Benjamin Franklin Snake Church?”
Preacher hit a thirty-foot bank shot, but Frank missed it. Preacher hit a left-handed hook shot from half-court, but Frank threw the ball over the basket.
“Look at me,” said Preacher. “I’m a senior citizen and I’ve given Frank the ‘H’ and the ‘O.’ Ho, ho, ho, Merry Christmas. But wait, I must stop and ponder this existential dilemma. How could I, a retired blue-collar worker, a fixed-income pensioner, a tattered coat upon a stick, how could I be defeating the legendary Frank Snake Church? What the hell is wrong with this picture? What the hell ever happened to Frank Snake Church?”
“I am Frank Snake Church in the here and now and forever,” Frank said and laughed. He loved to listen to Preacher rant and rave. A retired railroad engineer, Preacher was a gray-haired black man with a big belly. He stood at the top of the key, bounced the ball off the free-throw line, and off the board into the hoop.