“You better give it a try,” I say over the basketball clatter and the thrum the giant machine’s making. I feel exactly like a dad among other real dads, encouraging my son to do what he doesn’t want to do because he’s afraid he’ll be bad at it.
“D’you always dribble before you shoot?” someone in the bleachers shouts out at the moving conveyor. A short bald man who’s about to try a precarious hook shot yells back without even looking: “Why don’t you try eating me,” then wings a shot that misses everything and causes other people in the bleachers to laugh.
“You do it.” Paul snorts a disparaging little snuffle. “I saw some Nets scouts in the crowd.” The Nets are his favorite team to belittle, because they’re no good and from New Jersey.
“Okay, but then
you
have to do it.” I cuff his shoulder in an unnatural comradely way, catching another unappetizing look at his offended ear.
“I don’t
have
to do anything,” he says without looking at me, just watching the bright, indoor air a-throng with orange balls.
“Okay, you just watch me, then,” I say lamely.
I step around him and into line and am quickly right up to the little gate behind a small black kid. I take a look back at Paul, who’s watching me, leaning an elbow on the plywood fence that separates the arena from the waiting line, his face completely unawed, as if he expects to see me do something stupid beyond all previous efforts.
“Check out how my balls rotate,” I call back at him, hoping it’ll embarrass him, but he doesn’t seem to hear me.
And then I’m up on the rumbling belt, moving right to left as the rack of balls and the little forest of stage-lit baskets, backboards and poles begins quickly gliding past in the opposite way. I’m instantly nervous about falling down, and don’t make a move toward a ball. The black kid in front of me has on a huge purple-and-gold team jacket that says
Mr. New Hampshire Basketball
on the back in sparkling gold letters, and he seems able to handle at least three balls at any one time, virtually spewing shots at every goal, every height, every distance, and with each shot emitting a short, breathy
whoof
like a boxer throwing a punch. And of course everything goes spinning in: a bank, a set, a one-hander, a fall-away, a short-arm hook like the ball boy’s—everything but an alley-oop and a lean-in power jam.
I lay hands on my first ball halfway through the ride, still not confident about my balance, my heart suddenly starting to beat fast because other shooters are behind me. I frown out toward the clutter of red metal posts and orange baskets, set my feet as well as I can, cock the ball behind my ear and heave up a high arching shot that misses the basket I expected to hit, strikes a lower one, bounces out and nearly drops in the very lowest goal, which I hadn’t actually seen.
I quick grab another ball as Mr. New Hampshire Basketball is putting up shot after shot, making his stagy little
whoof
noise and hitting nothing but net. I take similar aim at a medium-height basket at a medium distance, hoist my shot off one-handed, though well gyroed by a good rotation I learned from watching TV, and come pretty damn close to making it, though one of Mr. Basketball’s shots hisses through just ahead and knocks mine down off into the gutter. (I also lose my balance and have to grab the plastic escalator handrail to keep from falling over sideways and causing a pileup.) Mr. B. flashes me a suspicious look over his gigantic purple roll collar, as if I’d been trying to mess with his head. I smile at him and mutter, “Lucky.”
“You’re supposed to dribble
before
you shoot, you cluck,” the same idiot yorks out again amid a lot of other shouting and metallic hum and machinery smell. I turn around and take a squinty look at the crowd, which is essentially invisible because of the bright lights on the baskets. I don’t really give a shit who yelled at me, though I’m sure it’s not someone whose son is in the audience, smirking.
I complete one more wayward shot before I’m to the end—a lumpy, again off-balance one-hander that clears everything and drops behind the baskets and the wooden barrier, where basketballs aren’t supposed to go. “Good arch!” the little wiseacre gym-rat kid cracks as he climbs back to retrieve my ball. “Wanna play horse for a million bucks?”
“Maybe I’ll have to start trying, then,” I say, my heart pounding as I step off the belt onto terra firma, all the excitement over now.
Mr. New Hampshire Basketball is already walking away toward the sports-media gallery with his father, a tall black man in a green silk Celtics jacket and matching green leisure pants, his long arm over the boy’s scrawny shoulders, no doubt laying out a superior strategy for rubbing off the screen, picking up the dribble, taking the J while drawing the foul—all just words to me, a former sportswriter, with no practical application on earth.
Paul is staring at me down the length of the conveyor. Conceivably he’s been barking his approval while I’ve been shooting but doesn’t want it known now. I have in fact enjoyed the whole thing thoroughly.
“Take your best shot!” I shout through the loud crowd noise. The ball boy, off to one side now, is chatting up his chunky, pony-tailed blond sweetheart, laying his two meaty hands on her two firm shoulders and goo-gooing in her eyes like Clark Gable. For some reason, having I’m sure to do with queuing theory, no one is on the conveyor at the moment. “Come on,” I shout at Paul with false rancor. “You can’t do any worse than I did!” Only a few spectators remain in the darkened grandstand. Others are heading off to other exhibits. It is the perfect time for Paul. “Come on, Stretch,” I say—something I vaguely remember from a sports movie.
Paul’s lips move—words I just as well can’t hear. A jocose “Up your ass” or a lusty “Why don’t you eat shit”—his favorite swear words from another, antique vintage (mine). He looks behind him, where there’s now mostly empty lobby, then just ambles slowly up to the entrance in his clumsy, toes-in gait, pauses to look down toward me again with what appears to be disgust, stares for a moment at the spotlit baskets and stanchions, and then simply steps on, completely alone.
The conveyor moves him seemingly much more slowly than I myself was moved, and certainly leisurely enough to get off six or seven good shots and even to dribble before he shoots. The ball boy takes a casually demeaning look to where Paul is moving along in his garbage-pail shoes and sinister haircut, hands fixed oddly on his hips. He cracks a nasty grin, says something to his girlfriend so she’ll look, which she does, though in a kinder, more indulgent older-girl’s way at the goony boy who can’t help being goony but has a big heart and racks up top math scores (which he doesn’t).
When he comes to the end—having faced the baskets the whole way, never once looking at me, just staring into the little arena like a mesmerist, never taking a shot or even touching a ball, only gliding—he just wobbles off on the carpet and walks over and stands by me, where I’ve been watching like any other dad.
“High fives,” a straggler shouts in a ridiculing voice from the grandstand.
“Next time think about trying a shot,” I say, ignoring the shout, since I’m happy with his efforts.
“Are we coming back here anytime soon?” He looks at me, his small gray eyes showing concern.
“No,” I say. “You can come back with
your
son.” Another batch of adults is invading the bleachers, with more sons and daughters plus a few dads beginning to line up at the gate, checking out how the whole gizmo works, calculating the fun they’re about to have.
“I liked that,” Paul says, looking at the stage-lit posts and baskets. I hear the surprising voice of some boy he once was (seemingly only a month ago, now disappeared). “I’m thinking I’m thinking all the time, you know? Except when I was on that thing I quit. It was nice.”
“Maybe you should do it again,” I say, “before it gets crowded.” Unhappily, there’s no way for him to stay on The Shoot-Out for the rest of his days.
“No, that’s okay.” He’s watching new kids glide away from the gate, new balls arching into the vivid air, the first inevitable misses. “I don’t usually like things like that. This was an exception. I don’t usually like things I’m supposed to like.” He stares at the other kids empathetically. This cannot be a simple truth to admit to your father—that you don’t like the things you’re supposed to like. It is adult wisdom, though most grown men would fail of it.
“Your ole man isn’t very good at it either. If it makes you feel any better. He’d like to be. Maybe you can tell me what you liked about it that made you quit thinking you’re thinking.”
“You’re not that old.” Paul looks at me peevishly.
“Forty-four.”
“Umm,” he says—a thought possibly too fretsome to speak. “You could still improve.”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Your mother doesn’t think so.” This doesn’t qualify as a current event.
“Do you know the best airline?”
“No, let’s hear it.”
“Northwest,” Paul says seriously. “Because it flies to the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul.” And suddenly he’s trying to suppress a big guffaw. For some reason this is funny.
“Maybe I’ll take you out there sometime on a camping trip.” I watch basketballs fill the interior air like bubbles.
“Do they have a hall of fame in Minnesota?”
“Probably not.”
“Okay, good,” he says. “We can go anytime, then.”
O
n our way out we make a fast foray through the gift boutique. Paul, at my instruction, picks out tiny gold basketball earrings for his sister and a plastic basketball paperweight for his mother—gifts he feels uncertain they’ll like, though I tell him they will. We discuss a rabbit’s foot with a basketball attached as an olive branch gesture for Charley, but Paul goes balky after staring at it a minute. “He has everything he wants,” he says grudgingly, without adding “including your wife and your kids.” So that after buying two tee-shirts for ourselves, we pass back out into the parking lot with Charley ungifted, which suits both of us perfectly.
On the asphalt it is full, hot Massachusetts afternoon. New cars have arrived. The river has gone ranker and more hazy. We’ve spent forty-five minutes in this hall of fame, which pleases me since we got our fill, exchanged words of hope, encountered specific subjects of immediate interest and concern (Paul thinking he’s thinking) and seem to have emerged a unit. A better start than I expected.
The big, jumpsuited Oklahoman is sprawled out with his tiny daughter under one of the linden saplings by the river’s retaining wall. They are enjoying their lunch from tinfoil packets spread on the ground, and drinking out of an Igloo cooler, using paper cups. He has his Keds and socks off and his pants rolled up like a farmer. Little Kristy is as pristine as an Easter present and talking to him in a confidential, animated way, wiggling one of his toes with her two hands while he stares at the sky. I’m tempted to wander over and offer a word of parting, talk to them twice because I’ve talked to them once, act as a better welcome committee for the Northeast Corridor, dream up some insider dope “I just thought about” and am glad to find him still here to share—something in the realty line. As always, I’m moved by the displacement woes of other Americans.
Only there’s nothing I know that he doesn’t (such is the nature of realty lore), and I decide against it and just stand at my car door and watch them respectfully—their backs to me, their modest picnic offering this big, panoramic, foreign-seeming river as comfort and company, all their hopes focused on a new settlement. Some people do nicely on their own and by the truest reckoning set themselves down where they’ll be happiest.
“Care to guess how hungry I am?” Paul says over the hot car roof, waiting for me to unlock his side. He is squinting in the sun, looking unsavory as a little perpetrator.
“Let’s see,” I say. “You were supposed to get us something from the fucking vending machines.” I say “fucking” just to amuse him. The freeway pounds along behind us—cars, vans, U-Hauls, buses—America on a move-in Saturday afternoon.
“I guess I just facked up,” he says to challenge me back. “But I could eat the asshole out of a dead Whopper.” An insolent leer further disfigures his pudgy kid’s features.
“Soup’d be better on an empty brain,” I say, and pop his door lock.
“Okay, doc-taaah! Doc-tah, doc-tah, doc-tah,” he says, snapping open his door and ducking in. I hear him bark in the car. “Bark, bark, bark, bark.” I don’t know what this is to signify: happiness (like a real dog)? Happiness’s defeat at the hands of uncertainty? Fear and hope, I seem to remember from someplace, are alike underneath.
From the linden tree shade, Kristy hears something in the afternoon breeze—a dog barking somewhere, my son in our car. She turns and looks toward me, puzzled. I wave at her, a fugitive wave her bumpkin father doesn’t see. Then I duck my own head into the hot-as-an-oven car with my son and we are on our way to Cooperstown.
A
t one o’clock, we pull in for a pit stop, and I send Paul for a sack of Whalers and Diet Pepsis while I wash dead grackle off my hand in the men’s. And then we’re off spinning again down the pike, past the Appalachian Trail and through the lowly Berkshires, where not long ago Paul was a camper at Camp Unhappy, though he makes no mention of it now, so screwed down is he into his own woolly concerns—thinking he’s thinking, silently barking, his penis possibly tingling.