This is the Part Where You Laugh (11 page)

The morning is like a new box of nails, dew silver on the grass. I walk up to the house to see if Grandma is awake. In her room, she's sitting in bed, eating saltine crackers, sipping at a cup of Sprite.

I say, “Good morning, Grandma.”

“Oh, good morning, sweetie.”

“Feeling all right?”

She smiles. “I'm doing just fine.”

I sit down on the edge of her bed and she stops eating.

“No, no. Keep eating, Grandma.”

She takes another bite of cracker.

I pat her leg. “Is today good?”

“Yes. I think we should take a short canoe ride together.”

“Perfect.” I stand up. “I'll be ready in five minutes.”

I grab pillows and a blanket from the closet, jog down the hill, flip the canoe, and set up a spot for Grandma in the front of the boat. Then I push the canoe to the edge of the water, slide the bow in, weight the stern with a rock, and jog back uphill.

Grandma's still sipping Sprite in bed.

“Are you ready?”

She raises her eyebrows. “Ready as I'll ever be.”

I help her to her feet. Support her as she shuffles out of the room, down the hall to the back door.

Grandpa's in his study, modeling. He calls out, “Where are you all going?”

“Short canoe ride, Grandpa.”

“Is that a good idea?”

I ignore that question. Slide the back door open and lift Grandma off her feet. “I can carry you from here.”

“Are you sure, sweetie? Even down the hill?”

“Definitely.”

I carry her down the hill through the long grass, past my tent, careful not to trip on any of the gopher mounds, the ruts, the bigger river rocks. I wade out into the water and set Grandma in the front of the canoe, on top of the pillows. Pull the blanket over her. “Are you comfortable, Grandma?”

“I'm perfect, sweetie.”

“Good.” I push off and jump in. The canoe rocks back and forth as it glides out. I hold the paddle. Wait for the glide to slow.

I stroke to the middle. The canoe cuts across green glass, no wind and no fish jumping. South of us, a family of ducks steps off a mud peninsula, swims out past the shallows into the algae patch.

“This is wonderful,” Grandma says.

“Yeah, it's pretty nice out here.” I say this as I scan the top of the water for caiman eyes, for the swish of a monster's tail.

“Oh no, sweetie,” Grandma says, “it's more than nice.”

I can't see her face, but I know she's smiling. I can hear the smile in her voice, see the way she tilts her head a little bit as if the smile weighs something, as if it pulls her head just a little bit off center.

We've had this meeting set up since the end of school. I wrote it on the calendar that I keep in the kitchen and circled it in bright red pen. It should be a good meeting. Coach always liked me. But I haven't talked to him since school got out, so I'm nervous. I make myself eat a bowl of cereal and drink a glass of water to try to settle my stomach before I leave, but I still feel like I could puke.

I bike down to the high school and lock my bike outside the gym. Go in the west-side door and onto the hardwood. I don't see anybody in there yet, and I'm 15 minutes early, so I start dribbling. Right-handed, left-handed, crossovers, behind my back, and cutting. I dribble out to the three-point line, then cross up an imaginary defender, drive, and lay the ball in off the glass. Then I do the same sequence but finish with a reverse layin to use the rim as protection against shot blockers.

Coach comes in. He says, “Can you do that with your left hand? If you come right to left?”

“No. Not as well, but I've been working on it.” I dribble back to the three-point line. Run the crossover, drive, and hit the layin left-handed. Then back to the three-point line, crossover, drive, and reverse layin with my left, but I miss the shot. The ball rolls off the front of the rim. I rebound and put it back with a power layin. Say, “Let me do that again.”

Coach smiles and nods. “Go, Russell Westbrook.”

I run the play four more times. On the first, I hit the reverse layin. Then I miss again. Then I hit two in a row.

“Good,” Coach says. “Now let's go to my office.”

I was just getting a sweat going and his office is hot. He reaches into a mini-fridge under his desk and pulls out an orange Gatorade. Hands it to me.

“Thanks, Coach.”

He waves me off. “Let's cut to the chase here, T. Let's talk about last year.”

“Okay, Coach.”

“Do you know why you made varsity as a freshman?”

I take a drink of Gatorade. “Is it because I was a year older than most freshmen?”

He smiles. “That probably didn't hurt you. But no. Most sophomores don't make varsity either. There were two reasons that you made it, and I'll give you a hint: neither of them had to do with your shot or your ball handling.”

“Well, I was going to guess my ball handling,” I say. “I wasn't going to guess my shooting, that's for sure. But it's getting better.”

Coach smiles again. He has a way of smiling that doesn't show any of his teeth. It's like his face turns into a map of cracks. He says, “Your handles are better than your shot, that's true, but it didn't have to do with that.”

I wait for him to tell me.

“See, T, after tryouts, we came up with two words for each player in the tryout pool. Things like ‘shooter' or ‘rebounder,' ‘mistake-prone,' ‘defender,' ‘lazy,' or ‘foolish.' And do you know what our two words were for you?”

I shake my head.

He holds up two fingers. Touches the first finger and says, “Quickness.” He touches the second finger and says, “Passion.” He smiles again. His face cracks into a dozen lines.

“Thanks, Coach.”

“No, don't thank me. You earned those two words. Those were the words that all of the coaches agreed on. We needed a guard quick enough to stay with any guard in the league, and we also needed a kid passionate enough about the game of basketball to go out and bleed on that floor, to dive for loose balls, run through screens, play help defense. And that's why you made varsity.”

“Thanks, Coach.”

“The problem is”—he pauses—“we didn't know that you'd make someone else bleed on the court too.”

I hang my head when he says that. I hate to think about that night. I hate to think about the lost season, how much I let everyone down, how I let that player get to me. I say, “It was a big mistake, Coach. I'm real, real sorry about that.”

“Now I understand,” Coach says. “I know what he said about your mom, and I get how fired up you can be during a ballgame. Believe me, I understand all that. Your passion is infectious out there. But still, you can't do what you did. You can't act like that.”

“I know, Coach. I really do.”

“See, because he was running the other direction, there was so much force in the punch. He ran into your fist, and it looked like his head was going to come off.”

“I know, Coach. I jammed my wrist when I hit him. My wrist didn't loosen up for a week.”

Coach nods. “Did you see the video on YouTube?”

“No, Coach. I didn't want to see that. Creature told me.”

“It went viral. The video has a little bit of game footage to start, then the punch, then the paramedics on the court and a long shot of a girl holding her hands to her mouth and crying.”

“It sounds horrible.” I hang my head even more. It's like someone's placed a 45-pound weight bar on the back of my neck and it's pushing my head down.

“Yeah, that video is horrible,” he says. “And it might even be why you got such a harsh penalty from the league.”

I nod.

He says, “There was a punch like that a long, long time ago in the NBA. A forward named Kermit Washington punched another forward, a guy named Rudy Tomjanovich, and it ended up being Washington's defining moment in the league.”

I flinch when he says that. That weight bar is still pushing down on my neck and I can't look up at Coach.

“But,” Coach says, “we won't let that happen to you. I won't let that happen. You were just a kid last year, a freshman in high school, and it was a mistake. So that's not what I think of when I see you. It really isn't.” Coach takes a deep breath and lets it out. “When I look at you, I see a young player who's passionate about the game, someone who works three times as hard as the average player. You're on the short side and you don't have Rajon Rondo–size hands, but you have a lot of talent and you also love the game. And that matters. Big-time. You hear me?”

“Yes, Coach.”

“So that incident? That punch? That suspension for the rest of the season? It doesn't mean much to me now. It's over. You hear me?”

When he says that, it's as if that weight bar slides down a little, settles on my shoulders, not just the back of my neck, and I can lift my head. I say, “Thanks, Coach.”

“This is a new year,” he says, “and if you keep working the way you do, then you've got a shot at All-League as a sophomore. Then, who knows from there?”

I don't say anything but I smile pretty big when he says that. I want All-League bad, but I never tell anyone about that.

Coach says, “That's the truth. You could earn that. And I'm excited about the coming season.” He leans over and takes another Gatorade out of his mini-fridge, opens it, and gulps a big drink. He sits back and sighs. “Now, honestly,” he says, “how's your anger?”

“Coach?”

“I mean, when was the last time you got in a fight?”

I hesitate a little because I know I can't tell Coach the whole truth. I lower my head and say, “I don't really fight, Coach.”

“You don't?” he says. “Let me put it this way: When was the last time you punched someone?”

The Seventh-day Adventist pops into my head. I can see his head spin when I hit him, the way his mouth was open halfway as he lay slumped against the wall. But I can't tell Coach about that. I have to lie. I say, “I haven't hit anyone since that basketball game.”

“You haven't? Are you sure?”

“That's the truth, Coach.” When I say that, I can feel my eyes wanting to twitch, like I want to blink a lot or something, and I remember how my science teacher last year told us about the physical signs of lying. So I make myself look Coach right in the eyes, and I don't blink, and I don't look away.

He says, “So you've been avoiding trouble altogether?”

“Yes, sir,” I say. Another lie. He doesn't know about shoplifting either.
But
—I ask myself—
is it trouble if I never get caught?
In my head I go back and forth on that one, and in the end, I decide that it's not trouble since I don't get
in trouble
for it.

Coach takes another big drink of his Gatorade. “That's good, T. That's real good, because I want you to have a full season this year.”

“Okay, Coach.” I stand up and throw my Gatorade bottle in the garbage can next to his desk.

Coach leans down, picks the bottle back up, and tosses it in the recycling bin instead.

Near the Chevron late that evening, I see another missing dog poster. It reads:

LOST BOXER-CHIHUAHUA MIX

BLACK-AND-WHITE, NAMED LUCY

LOST NEAR AYRES LAKE ON SATURDAY

REWARD OF $100

CALL (541) 554-6095

I shake my head. Feel sort of bad. There was a dog that hung around one of our motels a few years ago. He was a small gray terrier, skittish and mangy, but I loved him and I named him Chris Paul III. Sometimes I'd bring him into our room when my mom was gone. I would save a little food for him, Taco Bell meat, anything I could find in the Dumpster, or unfinished food I'd scrounged at Subway.

I'd sit on the bed in our motel room and pet behind his ears, watch him fall asleep on my lap. We'd watch television, and sometimes a loud noise on the screen would make him pop his head up and look around like someone was trying to get him. Sometimes he'd even growl at the screen, and his ears would turn into two sharp triangles, and that always made me laugh.

But one day I couldn't find him and I searched all over. I searched behind the adult video store, the shoe outlet, and the fast-food Dumpsters. I went over to the Red Apple and the Mexican food cart. But he was nowhere, and it wasn't until I was walking home after dark that I found him.

He'd been hit by a car on 6th Street. I found him lying on the gutter grate, the storm drain, his head turned the wrong way around. He was so small lying there, and I picked him up and saw that his front leg was broken too, snapped and pushed back, and I threw a rock at the nearest parked car even though I knew it wasn't the car that had hit him.

I remember the week after he died, how I didn't want to shoot baskets or watch TV, how the motel room felt so empty when my mom was gone, how I kept looking for him each morning before realizing, once again, that he wasn't coming back.

I was thinking about this and feeling sort of bad for the people who'd lost their pets. In a way, I'd known these things might happen when I released the caimans, but in another way I hadn't. I guess I didn't really think it all through. I wanted something exciting for the people along the lake, and that is what's starting to happen.

I shake my head and jog over to Mr. Tyler's house so I can do something I don't feel bad about. In front of his single-wide, the warm stench of our collective summer's worth of urine hits me before I even leave the sidewalk. I turn in a circle and check for anyone who might see me, then hop up on the porch.

For some reason, Mr. Tyler's left his shoes there by the front door. I look over my shoulder once more, but there's still no one out in the neighborhood. I unzip my fly, whip it out, and pee long and hard into his shoes, fill one to the brim, then switch to the other, and get that shoe most of the way full as well.