This is the Part Where You Laugh (2 page)

That night, before I go to my tent, I check on my grandma. She's in bed watching
Jeopardy!,
talking to the TV. I sit next to her as she says, “What is heliocentrism?”

One of the contestants says, “What is heliocentrism?”

Then the host says, “That is correct.”

I say, “Hey, Grandma, how are you feeling?”

My hand's next to her on the bedspread. She pats my fingers. “I'm doing well,” she says. “Quite well.”

“Really?”

She smiles at me and squeezes my hand. “I think so. As well as can be expected.”

The contestant on the show picks another square and the host reads the answer. Grandma says, “Who is Henry the Eighth?”

The contestant says, “Who is Henry the Eighth?”

I say, “Is this a rerun or do you always just know the answers?”

Grandma smiles at me. “I was a high school teacher for 36 years, sweetie.”

“And that's how you learned everything?”

“Well, my first school was a small school and I had to teach five different subjects while I was there, so I learned a lot along with the students.” She squeezes my hand again.

I say, “Did you like teaching?”

“Yes,” she says. “Definitely.”

“Then tell me a story.” I've always liked her stories, it doesn't matter what they're about. When Grandma and I used to go out in the canoe together, she'd tell me stories the whole time.

“Okay,” she says. “Let me see….” She drums her fingers on the back of my hand. I can tell she's thinking because she doesn't answer the next
Jeopardy!
clue.

“Okay,” she says. “This one's from one of my last years of teaching.” She shifts her shoulders. Resettles on her pillow. “I was teaching AP literature to a class of 35 students. There was this one boy, sort of like you, looked like you, had a serious face all the time like you, but he was always falling asleep in class. He was a bright enough boy, but I couldn't keep him awake when I lectured. So one day, while he was asleep, I walked right up to him and leaned in close to his face and blew on his nose. When that woke him up, I said, ‘I almost kissed you. One more second, and I would have.' ”

“You said that?”

“Yes. And you should have seen his face. I was almost 70 years old by then, all wrinkly and shrunken down, and he just about jumped out of his chair when he saw my face so close to his. I told him I couldn't wait for another chance to kiss him, that I would take that very next chance to plant a big wet one on his lips.”

“Grandma.” I shake my head. “He never fell asleep again, did he?”

“No,” she says. “He almost did so many times, but then he'd sort of startle awake, and I'd see him check to see where I was in the room. Everyone else would see that too. His classmates would watch him, especially if he seemed tired. It became a sort of fun side story in that class, something that thickened the plot.”

“He was probably terrified.”

“He was a really nice kid. I just wanted to pull his leg a little.” Grandma shifts again on her pillow, makes a small noise in her throat like she's trying to swallow something sharp.

“Are you okay?” I say. “Are you hurting a lot?”

“A little. But I'm okay.” She closes her eyes.

“Do you need a pill?”

“No,” she says. “I don't like the pills.”

“Are you sure? You might need one.”

“No thanks. I just need some sleep.”

I kiss her forehead and stand up. “I'll let you rest.”

When I'm at the door, she says, “Travis, you know I love you?”

I look back and she has her eyes closed, her head tilted to the side.

My eyes get itchy and I open my mouth, but I can feel how creaky my voice is going to sound, so I don't say anything.

Somehow Grandma knows I'm still in the doorway. “You sleep well tonight,” she says. “36 nights in a row?”

“Yeah. Good memory.”

She smiles, her eyes still closed. “Goodnight, sweetie.”

“Goodnight, Grandma.”

Coming down the hall, I hear her say, “What is photosynthesis?” just before the TV contestant says, “What is photosynthesis?”

When I enter the living room, I see a light, a spark, out on the back porch. I stop and watch. There's the spark again, then a flame above a pipe, and I see my grandpa's face lit by that small light. Grandpa inhales, holds his smoke, and exhales. He's standing sideways, not looking in the house but down at the pipe in his hands. He sparks the lighter and puffs again. Turns and looks out at the lake. I stare at his dark outline.

There's a paperweight on the table, smooth and round and heavy, with
ZION NATIONAL PARK
chiseled into it. I think about throwing it through the plate glass, watching the glass shards explode onto my grandpa. I pick it up, hold it in my hand. Then I set it down. Turn around. Go back to the bathroom and brush my teeth, wait, lean against the wall, wait until I hear my grandpa come into the house and walk past me, down the hall to his bedroom.

Then I leave the bathroom, go through the living room and out onto the back porch, through the thick marijuana smoke hanging under the eaves.

Down at my tent, Creature's left a page of his writing on my sleeping bag.

Princess Nina Georgievna, your face long enough to travel by car, your memories of your father like the color indigo at the break of midnight, executed Romanovs in 1919.

You tell me to come forward. You do not look at me as I walk around you. You hold up one finger, spin it in the air, and I keep walking.

Royal. You make your hand flat and I stop.

This is what I must do:

Lean in. A bottle of pure Mexican vanilla in your purse, I smell the scent behind your ears.

Stand behind you and peel the dress off of your shoulders. Run a finger down the ticked line of your spine.

Use my thumbs to rub the knots in your trapezius muscles.

Make up stories about your father being alive and well, hiding in Northern Europe, in Sweden, in an apartment in Stockholm.

Tilt your head back and suck softly on your neck as your breathing gets heavy.

Let you take my hand and guide it down the loosened front of your undergarments where there never was a bra.

Turn you around. Get down on my knees as you hike up your hem, the lace sliding to the tops of your thighs.

Sunday evening. I walk along the shoreline north, toward where I released the caimans, making my way slowly through the bigger blackberry growths, ducking under vines, and stepping through the tall grass where it's grown over the trail.

I spook a gopher snake, five feet long and bulging with a rat. The snake slides out in front of me on the narrow trail, the rodent dragging along in the middle of its body, and I smile and walk behind it until it cuts a hard left into the heaviest of the blackberry thickets and I can't see it anymore.

At the small beach where I released the caimans, I find only two rubber bands and a piece of duct tape. No duffel bags. I look around, but they're nowhere. Someone must have taken them. I pick up the rubber bands and the duct tape and put them in my pocket.

Searching the shore, I expect small animals ripped apart and hundreds of crocodile footprints. But there are no tracks, no clues. I crouch down where the mud meets the round rock, but I don't see anything. I check in the bushes, the reeds at the lake's edge, and under the willows. I crawl beneath the blackberry overhang and start to worry. What if the caimans died right off? What if that first night was too cold even though it's summer?

I look up and see a girl walk out onto one of the docks in front of me, a few docks down. I've never seen this girl before, a teenage girl, thin, athletic-looking. Tall. Straight dark hair. I watch her walk to the end of the dock, bend down, and put one of her hands in the water. She's on her knees.

It's shadowy where I am, underneath the blackberry bushes in the late evening, but I scoot back anyway, deeper into the darkness. I watch the girl and wait to see what she'll do.

I want her to take off her shirt, to strip down to a bikini or a bra or something like in a movie, but she doesn't. She sees something on the water and leans forward. Hesitates at the end of the dock, then splats into the lake face-first, like a dive but from her knees, fully clothed, landing on her face, not smooth at all. She comes up to the surface right after, swims out and circles around.

I scoot forward, trying to see what she's doing.

She circles some more, reaches and turns. Swims a few strokes and reaches again. I can't see what she's reaching for. I stand to get a better view, a blackberry vine catching in my hair. I pull the vine to the side and step forward, almost out of the shadows.

The girl lurches, brings her hands together like she's catching a handful of water. She swims back to the dock, holds on to the wooden edge with one hand, and puts something in a bag with the other hand. Then she pulls herself out of the water, her clothes clinging to her skin. She stands up, and I wish it were lighter out, a little earlier in the evening, so I could see her better.

The girl grabs her bag, walks up the dock to the stairs on the hillside, jogs those steps, and disappears into her backyard.

I wait. Hope she'll return. But she doesn't. I watch the empty dock as it gets darker.

I walk back along the gravel path to the end of the blackberry overhangs, where the dirt trail is wider. There are three old trailers at the north end of the park, then the mobile homes, six in a row along the west shore before my grandparents'.

Monday morning. The alarm on my watch beeps and I push the button to turn it off. 6:15. I'm tired but I roll to my knees, unzip my tent door, and crawl out. Reach back for my socks and shoes, and put them on. Then I grab my basketball and dribble over to Creature's house, sit on his porch steps, and try not to think about sleep. Instead, I focus on my summer goals:

Creature arrives a few minutes later. He takes his paper-route bag off his shoulder. Slings it down next to me.

“Okay,” I say. “Let's do this?”

“Travis, baby, I'm tired.” Creature leans and stretches his hamstrings. “Let's just sleep for a while. We can work out later.”

“No. Damian Lillard was the first person to show up at the gym every day in college. We gotta be like that.”

Creature rubs his eyes. “Sleep for two hours, then go at 8:30?”

I try to palm my basketball, but it slips. I keep trying.

Creature says, “Or we could just work out at night?”

“Creat, you're not even playing AAU this summer. You have to be more disciplined.”

“But I'm a poet,” he says, “and poet two-guards are miraculous.”

“I can't remember. What did that announcer say at the Vegas tourney?”

“He called me the Cutthroat Creature on the Court.”

“Right. So ‘cutthroat' means you'd slit a throat to dominate. And summer workouts are like slowly slitting everyone else's throats. You'd be the only one living.” I smile at Creature. Happy with myself. I don't usually say things so poetically.

“Whatever,” he says.

I spread my hand wider on my basketball. I can almost palm it now, but it slips again.

“Here,” Creature says, and takes the ball. “Dig your thumb in like this.” He palms my ball right-handed, then left. Then hands it back to me. “Have you started that book I left for you?”

“The
Drown
one?”

“Yeah. The story collection.”

“I don't know if—”

“No.” He snaps his fingers and points at me. “You want me to do workouts in the early morning? Then you have to develop your mind in return. Who's the teacher now, baby?”

I shake my head.

He says, “A great point guard is a baller
and
a thinker. A literary genius. A Method Man on the court.”

I spin my ball in my hands. “You be the team's poet, and I'll get my hands dirty. Dive on the floor. Make hustle plays. We're good that way.”

“No,” Creature says. “No, no, no. We've got to both be poets. We need a backcourt full of literary thinking if we're going to run the pick-and-roll. You know what I'm saying?”

“You sound like my grandma.”

“Then your grandma has good taste. She likes real literature. And anyway, that book I gave you is written by Edwidge Danticat. She's sick.” Creature holds out his fist for me to tap it.

“Fine,” I say, “I'll read the book. But that means you have to come train with me right now.”

Creature comes back out of his house wearing shorts, carrying his basketball and two Rice Krispies Treats. He hands me one of the treats. “Breakfast of champions?”

I tear open the blue cellophane and eat as we start dribbling down the road.

I say, “All left-handed on the way there.”

Creature says, “I was already dribbling left.”

We step through the bushes and hop the wall, cross the little bridge to Ayres Road. When we get to the north end of the lake, Creature picks up his dribble. Stares at the water.

I pick up my dribble too. Think about the caimans. Wonder if they're eating yet. Wonder if they're building a nest or hiding out somewhere. Then I think about the girl, the girl in her wet clothes, how athletic she looked. I wish again that she'd taken her shirt off, that I could've seen a little more of her, or that I was closer to her dock when she was out there.

Creature says, “I'm never going to understand it.”

“What?” I say. I'm still thinking about the girl.

He points to the west side of the lake, then the east. “How can half of this lake be for rich people and half of it be for trailer-park trash?”

“To be accurate,” I say, “it's mostly elderly trailer-park trash.”

“Right. Elderly trash. Whatever. Half's for rich and half's for people in trailers and mobile homes, single-wides and double-wides.” Creature has his basketball resting on his hip, and he rolls it up and palms it. Holds it out in front of him. Then he says, “Disparities of wealth and power in America, and right here, an example of disparate living situations.”

“Damn.” I shake my head. “What did you score on the verbal part of the SATs, Creat?”

“790, baby. I missed two analogies, or as I like to think of it, I found different analogous connections.”

I dribble through my legs. “What was your math score on that?”

“Let's not talk about math.” Creature hocks a loogie and spits it onto the cement. “Math is for followers, for sheep, for people who are obsessed with right and wrong, with black and white. And since I'm not naturally inclined to racism, I don't enjoy mathematics.” He smiles.

I go around my back with my basketball a couple of times. Roll my neck. Say, “Did you even score 500 on that math section?”

“Not even close.” Creature laughs. “Thankfully, I didn't need that to qualify D-1, since it combines with reading to make your overall score.”

I dribble low, drop my knee to double-dribble off my shin, AND1-style, and jam my thumb on the ball. “Ooh.” I shake my thumb out. Flex my hand.

Creature says, “You can tell a man by his hands, right?” He spreads his fingers, the brown skin on the backs of his knuckles laced with light-colored scars. “See all of these?” he says. “Pride, that's all. Good pride in games. Bad pride at parties.”

I say, “Well, there are a lot of dickheads out there.”

“Maybe true. But also maybe we fight too much? Maybe some of those dickheads aren't worth the scars on the backs of our knuckles?” Creature holds his ball up above his head, pressing it like he's grabbed a rebound in traffic. “Keep your elbows out. Sharp as broken bottles.” He drops the ball and starts his dribble again.

I dribble with him. “I got Mr. Tyler's porch again last night.”

Creature laughs. “You think he knows what's causing that bad smell?”

“I don't know what he's thinking.”

“Well, we better keep it up,” Creature says. “I actually hold my piss sometimes just to let him have it. It's like a special gift from me to him.”

“Yeah, last night it felt like I pissed a gallon when I finally let it go. I even got his rocking chair.”

“Nice,” Creature says. “Mr. Tyler deserves a healthy gallon of our love.”

I'm alone when I play.

That's how it was at the court behind the motel where we moved when I was eight, and that's how it is now. I'm alone. Even in games, it's like no one else is on the court with me. I ran into a moving screen once in a game in sixth grade, an obvious offensive foul, and it surprised me because until that moment I was playing the game by myself. I didn't see the other players until I ran into one of them. The man I was guarding wasn't even a whole person in front of me, he was just hips and the ball, and that's all I saw when I guarded him. I ran into his teammate on that screen, and my eyes flashed open, or I guess my eyes opened wider than they were before. Then I saw people everywhere, but just for a second.

They went away again as soon as I got to the free-throw stripe on the next possession. I toed the line, dribbled twice, spun the ball in my hand, brought it up, and exhaled. That's how it is for me. When the ball is in my hands, it doesn't matter. Nothing.

My hands are loose.

I don't need to steal anything.

I don't need to hit anything.

Nothing matters except whether or not I can make that play. Can I split the double team to get the ball across in under 10? Can I head-fake in the paint to catch the big on the intermediate? Can I dime the no-look bounce pass on the pick-and-slip?

I have teammates and I'm a true point. I love to pass, so this might not make sense to anyone, me being alone out there. It probably doesn't. I guess other basketball players don't think like that. Maybe, or maybe not. I've never heard anyone talk about the game the way it seems to me. But when my game's going, that's how it feels. What happens when that ball leaves my hands is no longer real. Once that ball's gone and I cut to the open space or I set a pick on the weak side, all I'm doing is moving through the labyrinth.

Creature slows every once in a while to run dribbles behind his back, always left to left, over the top, through his legs, and back to his left with a spin. I don't spin or do crossovers or anything fancy, just work not to lose my dribble and keep my head up.

Creature says, “You're gonna be the top point guard in the league this winter.”

“If they let me play again.”

“Forget about that. They'll let you play. Our team needs your playmaking and hustle.”

“Maybe.”

“Don't worry about that, baby. They'll forget about that little thing.”

“That little thing?”

“Okay, that big thing,” he says. “And maybe they won't forget about it, but they'll get past it, you know? I'll talk to Coach. I'm a senior leader now. I'll say that you're our best sophomore, and—the truth—you're our second-best player.”

We jog and dribble down Gilham to the crossing at the skate park. There are double rims there, and we practice dribbling out of phantom traps, running behind our backs to cross center court, then right and left layins. We take turns.

When it's shooting time, we don't talk. That's my rule. I say, “A shooter has to cancel everything out. No talking. No whining. No excuses. Kobe Bryant made 2,000 shots per day when he was building his shot.
Made
2,000. So
taking
500 is the least we can do.”

Creature doesn't like the no-talking rule, but he shrugs. “I guess you're my point guard.”

We go to opposite rims and do our work.

After shooting, we meet in the middle to finish with push-ups. Cut-downs. Creature beats me on every set.

By the time I get to four, I'm struggling to do a single push-up. My shoulders are twitchy and my chest is burning.

Creature's already finished. He says, “You're looking a little shaky there, baby. Come on now.”

I do the last few push-ups one at a time, resting on my knees between each one, and when I'm finished, the fronts of my shoulders are locked up. I say, “It feels like someone's driven nails into them.” I shake out my arms while I sip water at the drinking fountain.

Creature says, “Pull-ups tomorrow, right?”