Game (3 page)

T
he first game in the second half of the season was a non-league game against Wadleigh. Wadleigh was a trip because the whole team was made up of skinny Latino brothers who could out-and-out fly. If they got you in their running game, you were over before you started, because they never got tired. The only way to stop them was to get an early lead and then control the boards so they couldn't run. It also helped to beat on them a little if the refs let you get away with it.

We went downtown to their raggedy-butt gym, checked out their fly girls, and had just started our
warm-ups when Ricky came over and told us who was starting. House had put both the white boys in the starting lineup with me, Ruffy, and Sky. Ricky was mad big-time, and so was I. On the bench before the game House came up with some noise about getting in as many combinations of players as possible because it was a non-league game.

“I want to see what works and what doesn't,” he said.

“You didn't see what worked in the first games?” Sky asked.

“I'm still trying out things,” House came back. “Don't worry about it.”

I knew the guy who was supposed to be guarding me. He lived in the Bronx and ran with the Latin Deuces. He had a funny way of holding his face, and his cousin, a foxy mama I tried to get next to once, told me he had been shot in his face when he was nine. I called him Stoneface behind his back, but I didn't mess with him too tough because the dude acted like he might have been a little off.

Wadleigh got the ball first, and House called for a one-two-two zone, which is seriously wack against a running club. While you're falling back into a
zone position, they're going past you to the hoop. Stoneface brought the ball down, faked toward Colin, then flew past him and made a layup over Sky. They had the first deuce.

On defense a little dark-haired guard took the ball away from Colin before he got to half-court. They had four points.

Just about the whole first quarter was Wadleigh's show. They were doing anything they wanted to and we were flatfooted. Colin couldn't play any D at all and was doing his toreador moves, watching guys go past him.

Meanwhile, I'm checking out Tomas. What I saw was that he knew how to use his body, blocking out on offense and being kind of strong on defense. But he never got off the floor. It's okay to block out, but you have to jump or guys will go over you, especially if they're quick enough to roll to your side. On offense he had a few moves and was strong to the basket, but he wasn't getting up. Twice his man knocked his shot away, and once, when Tomas made a weak fake and tried an easy shot from under the hoop, the defensive guy jumped up and grabbed the ball in midair. When he did
that, all the girls from Wadleigh started cracking up on the sideline.

House kept calling the same two plays over and over. Me and Colin were bringing the ball upcourt slow, passing in to Ruffy or Sky at the high post, then slanting across looking for the soft pick high while Tomas set up deep and rolled away from the ball looking for the inside pass.

When we weren't doing that, we were bringing Ruffy way out to set a high pick, crossing the off guard out near the foul line, and trying to set up a backdoor or a chippy for one of the forwards. Either way I could see that House was setting up the game so that Tomas would look good.

The guys on Wadleigh saw what was going down and were eating it up. I asked House to switch to one-on-one so I could guard Stoneface, but he wouldn't. As we got to the end of the first quarter, it was Wadleigh 26 and us 14. Our guys were down and Wadleigh was having fun.

The second quarter went the same way. It was Wadleigh doing what they wanted to do and us playing like we were at practice or something. I tried setting a few picks for Colin, but he ignored
them and went for the inside play the way House told him.

Near the end of the half Wadleigh hit a couple of threes and were nonchalanting the whole deal. I hate it when guys start acting like the game is over and they're too good to lose. Then Stoneface got into a switch with their center, faked inside, and when Ruffy followed him out of the paint, threw up a pretty hook and made it. The guys from Wadleigh goofed big-time on that. They weren't showing us any respect. I knew what House was doing. He was working out his game plan and, because it wasn't a league game, didn't care if we lost or not. I'd take the loss, but I wasn't giving up the respect.

Colin passed me the pill on the inbound and stopped to wait for it back, but I started downcourt. Stoneface picked Colin up at half-court and came down with him. I stopped ten feet behind the key, pointed at Stoneface, and beckoned for him to come on out and get me. He wasn't going to let that slide and came over. My man switched to Colin.

Stoneface is quick and he's real strong. He's got this way of holding his hands up about shoulder high to make you think he's not going for the ball,
but he's moving his body into you and putting you off-balance so you can't get around him. I saw that but I knew I could beat it.

“Yo!” I threw a head fake to the right, the first one that Stoneface had seen all day, and came back hard to my left, dipping under his shoulder.

I knew I had half a step, maybe less, and Stoneface was going to be coming. I went hard down the left side, planted on the line, and went up and across the lane and threw it down from the far side.

It was sweet and everybody in the gym knew it. Ruffy screamed, and Abdul, who had come in for Sky, fell down like he had fainted.

The ref blew the whistle and said something to Abdul about taunting, but he didn't call a technical. House called a time-out. When we got to the bench, he was looking up at the clock. There was still more than a minute to go in the half.

“Drew, sit down!” he barked.

I knew House was pissed, but I just shrugged it off. As far as I was concerned, I hadn't done anything wrong.

I didn't play at all in the second half. The guys in the game kept looking over toward where I sat. They
were feeling for me, and I knew they were confused. I had busted Stoneface and it had lifted the whole team, and then I was being punished for it. That sucked big-time.

The final score was 66–52.

“We will play this game the way I say we will play it,” House said in the locker room, “or we won't play it at all.”

The whole team was tense as we dressed. All the old guys came over to where I was sitting and told me how foul the crap was about sitting me down. The team bus was parked just off 14th Street, and we put the gear on it. When I saw House sitting in the back, I made it a point to sit up front. Fletch came over and told me that House wanted to see me.

“I don't want to see him,” I said.

“You mad about sitting?” Fletch asked.

“Yeah, I'm mad,” I said. “You think that was right?”

“I think he's the coach and has the job of running the team,” Fletcher said, sitting next to me. “Long as he's the coach and you're not, he tells you how to play.”

“And all the Uncle Toms on the team are supposed
to go along with him,” I said. “That's the way it's supposed to go? Or that's just the way you glad to see it go?”

He turned and just looked at me. I knew I shouldn't have said that bit about Uncle Toms, but I was still mad.

“I know how deep I am, boy.” Fletcher's voice was low, his words slow. “Do you know how deep you are?”

I didn't really know what he meant by that, but I turned away and looked out the window as the bus pulled off.

What I knew in my heart, as the bus made its way toward the West Side Highway, was that House was messing with me, with who I really was. When I was on the court, I was a different person than I was sitting in class or just walking down the street. House knew that as well as anybody. When I walked down the street I was ordinary, maybe even ordinary in a not-much kind of way. Sometimes when I hit the neighborhood and saw dudes a little older than me nodding out on the corner or standing around waiting for something to do with their lives, it made me feel terrible because something deep inside told
me I was headed in the same direction they were. All those bad feelings, the not being much, the struggle with school, all of it left me when I was on the court.

The bus stopped at the school, and we took out the equipment bags and Abdul and Needham carried them inside. I started down the hill.

“Hey, Drew!”

I turned around and saw Tomas coming toward me.

The big white boy ambled over to me, walking with one shoulder a little higher than the other. I hadn't noticed that before.

“Hey, Tommy,” I said.

“
Toe
-mus!” he said.

“Whatever.”

“No, Tomas.”

“Tomas.”

“So you're mad that you didn't play,” he said, pointing to his eyes. “I saw that.”

“Yeah, well, I was,” I said.

“Why don't you come to my house,” he said. “I have a shirt from my team in Prague I'll give you. Okay?”

“What?”

“You don't have a shirt from Prague,” he said. “Come with me and I'll give it to you.”

“No, that's okay, man.”

“We're friends, right?” he asked, sticking out his hand.

“Yeah.”

“So I don't live too far,” he said.

I didn't feel like going home with Tomas, but I didn't feel like just walking away, either. If anybody or anything gets in my face, I don't back off. That's not me.

“Yeah, okay,” I said.

When you look down into the valley along 145th Street, all you see is black faces because that's all that lives down there. Up the hill, especially past St. Nicholas, you're liable to run into anything, especially lately with all the white people buying houses in Harlem. I wondered if Tomas was rich. He didn't look rich, but you couldn't tell with some people.

All the time we were walking, Tomas was talking about Stoneface. He was saying that he wasn't that good and that Wadleigh wasn't that hot a team.

“They were good enough to beat us,” I said.

“Well, that's pretty good,” he said.

As we walked, I was wondering if House had told him to come over and talk with me. My mind was working overtime and I was sniffing the air for clues to what was going on. I didn't trust Tomas, but I wasn't going to back off, either.

Tomas spoke well. Just once in a while he would pronounce words differently than I expected. I asked him about it and he said he had studied English in Prague and that his family had lots of friends who spoke English.

We walked down to 142nd Street off Broadway. Tomas lived in a brownstone, and I figured his family must own it until I saw there were three bells over the mailboxes. We walked upstairs to the second floor. He knocked on the door and called his name out.

The peephole clicked. A woman opened the door and looked at Tomas, then at me, and then back to him.

“This is my friend Drew,” he said.

I followed Tomas into the apartment. It was okay, but nothing special. There were lots of books lying around and odd-looking pieces of colored glass. The woman asked us if we wanted something
to eat and I said no, but we were already headed for the kitchen.

“Please sit down,” the woman said to me.

“My mother, Anna,” Tomas said.

“He didn't think I was your girlfriend,” she said with a little crooked smile.

Tomas's mother was all-right-looking, no makeup, real plain clothes, as if she didn't care about her appearance. She had dark blond hair, blue-gray eyes, a thin mouth, and a large forehead that made her look a little like an old-fashioned doll. She sat at the table and folded her hands in front of her.

“Would you like some tea?” she asked after I had sat down.

“Sure,” I said, being sociable.

“Go buy some tea,” she said to Tomas.

“Hey, I don't need the tea,” I said.

She made him go out to buy it and told me to sit down when I was going to go with him. The way she told me to sit sounded like she thought she was my mother.

“So you are a basketball player, too?” she said when Tomas had taken some money off the refrigerator and left.

“Yes.”

“My husband used to play basketball in Prague,” she said. “Mostly he played football—you call it soccer over here—but he also played the basketball. Do you know anything about the Czech Republic?”

“Not really,” I said, trying to remember where Jocelyn had said it was.

“It's in eastern Europe,” she said. “It used to be part of Czechoslovakia, but we broke the country in two and now it's the Czech Republic. I don't know if that's good or not, but that's what it is.”

“Your husband still play ball?”

“No, he played when he was young,” she said. She nodded as if she was agreeing with herself. “But in 1977, during the struggle with the government, he was wounded and put in jail. His legs were hurt and he walked with a cane until he died.”

“I'm sorry to hear about that,” I said. “What did he do?”

“He was a teacher,” she said.

“No, I mean what did he do to go to jail?”

“David wrote a column in the university newspaper,” she said. “He wrote how we wanted to have more freedom and more choices in our schools. It
was only a small paper, but everybody on that staff went to jail. Including me.”

“You were in jail?”

“Don't smile,” she said, suddenly serious. “I was in jail for two weeks. When they took the men on the staff to jail, the women protested, too. We blocked traffic; some of us threw rocks at the state police. We had the scent of freedom and wanted it badly. It wasn't bad, because they didn't hit the women. They knew if they beat us up, it would just make more people mad at them.”

“You didn't think they would put you in jail?”

“We knew, but we also knew we had to do something,” she said. “You can't let them take away your freedom. You don't have anything else. When they finally let my husband out of jail, he was pretty bad off.”