The Outside Shot

  “I haven’t really made up my mind,” Ray said. “I might do some coaching. I figure whatever I get into I want to stick with, that’s why I’m hanging here at the mill until I make a decision.”

  “I can dig it,” I said. I watched Ray put the clipping back into his wallet and put his wallet away.

  “Look, I gotta split.” Ray looked at his watch. “The old lady probably wants me to do some shopping. You know how that domestic thing goes.”

  “Yeah, take care, man.”

  We exchanged fives and I watched him as he left. He took one of the balls and went down the street with it under his arm. I remembered my friend Cal, who had played in the NBA. He had shown me a scrapbook full of clippings, laughing all the while about how skinny he had been during his playing days. Things had worked out a lot differently for Ray. I wondered if he had more than that one sad clipping. Then I put it out of my mind.

  Larson pulled his car around and I got in next to him.

  “That Ray is all right,” I said. “You know he played for Montclare.”

  “He’s all right for this kind of game,” Larson said, pulling away from the curb. “You know, elbows, shoving, that kind of thing.”

  “You got to be kidding me,” I said. “That cat’s good. He can play any kind of ball.”

  “Maybe,” Larson said, hunching forward slightly over the steering wheel. “Anyway, the Fat Man likes him.”

  “Who?”

  “The Fat Man. Hey, you got to meet the Fat Man,” Larson said without looking at me. “He really knows basketball. Every once in a while he gets us a game off campus. He got us our first games with these guys. He scouts the teams and everything. Most of the time we play for five or ten dollars a man and we can only play seven guys. But once we played for three hundred.”

  “For what?”

  “Three hundred a man,” Larson said. “There was this team from Michigan that came to Indiana to play in a tournament. They wiped out the tournament and the Fat Man arranged for them to play us. He put up the money and bet on us.”

  “I know that Teufel doesn’t know anything about that kind of action,” I said. “He’d probably put you off the team if he did.”

  “He knows,” Larson said. “All that week he had us practicing traps. I couldn’t figure out why. Ray worked out with us, too. When we got to the game we found out they had this squad that averaged like six five.”

  “Averaged six five?”

  “Yep. But they didn’t have a ball handler.”

  “And so you trapped them all night.”

  “Now you got it,” Larson said. “Hey, look, you want to meet the Fat Man? We’re going by his place.”

  “I don’t know, maybe some other time.”

  “Well, listen,” Larson said, “I have to stop there anyway.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  Carmine’s Pizza Heaven was in the center of town. There were three pizza makers who stood in front of a large plate glass window and kneaded and tossed the dough.

  Larson motioned for me to follow him as he entered the shop. We went right past the booths filled with pink-legged high school girls and muscular farm boys with bad teeth that glowered at me as I went by them and through the swinging doors into the back.

  “Hey, Fat Man, we beat the mill boys again today.” Larson was talking to this real fat dude sitting on a stool in the corner of the kitchen.

  “How much you play them for?” Fat Man asked.

  “Twenty,” Larson said. “If I could play those guys every day I’d quit school tomorrow.”

  “Then you would be a fool,” Fat Man said. “Education is what you got one chance to get. After a while you get dumber and dumber, and if you ain’t got an education before then you too dumb to get one.”

  “Yeah, that figures,” Larson said. “Hey, I want you to meet Lonnie. He’s from New York. He’s not a bad ballplayer for a freshman.”

  I reached out my hand to shake the Fat Man’s. He looked me up and down and then slowly extended his hand.

  “Carmine,” he said. His fingers were almost as big around as my wrist. “But you can call me Fat Man. Mostly because everyone else does. Anytime you want a good pizza, you come on by here. We make the best pizza outside of New York and we don’t charge too much. People around here are getting good pizzas and don’t even know it.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “When are you getting us a big game?” Larson asked.

  “You want to play next week?” Fat Man asked. “Next Friday? I can get you a game with a team from the post office over in Muncie, fifty dollars a man.”

  “With the post office?” I looked at the Fat Man.

  “Yeah,” Fat Man answered without looking back at me. “They think they’re good. A good high school team could beat them. A guy that runs a used car lot over there is backing them. The only thing, you can’t play, Larson.”

  “How come?” Larson looked hurt.

  “I don’t want you to play over there ’cause of the publicity,” Fat Man said. “They’ll write you up because the drunk that has the used-car lot is beating the drums to get publicity for his hustle. If you don’t play, the most he gets is some talk around the neighborhood; you play, and it gets wrote up in the local rag and right away it looks like you’re taking advantage, which you are. You can coach if you want to. Get that guy, the colored guy, what’s his name … Ray, to play and maybe that skinny guy from the mill, let him win for a change.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Larson said. “I’ll let you know.”

  Me and Larson went out front and ordered a slice of pizza and some sodas.

  “Hey, how come he sets the games up and stuff?” I asked Larson.

  “Look, you might as well get used to it,” Larson said. “As long as you’re playing ball for a school like Montclare they’re going to be a lot of people trying to hang on to your coattails. Now chicks, they hang around you and they try to get you into the sack just so they can say ‘Hey, you know, I made it with a ballplayer.’ Guys, they’ll either try to buy you dinner or drinks or, like the Fat Man, he sets up games for us. That’s how he gets off.”

  “Yeah?” I looked at him. “And speaking of setting up games, man, I thought we were supposed to be playing for some bread today.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Larson began to fish around in his pocket. “I don’t usually pay off until the next day,” Larson said. “I don’t want to get in trouble for a gambling rap. You pay off right away, you get guys clamoring around for their bread, and bingo, somebody starts talking about getting in on the action and you got something you can’t handle. I don’t need it.”

  “I thought you said Teufel knows about it.”

  “He knows, man, and he don’t know, okay? Let’s put it like that. As long as he don’t know the details, then everything’s cool.”

  I got the twenty bucks from Larson and he gave me a ride back to the campus. I didn’t much like the talk with the Fat Man about betting on games. But it really wasn’t the school team that was playing. It was just a pickup game and didn’t mean anything. I told myself that twice before we got back to Orly Hall.

  Colin had this guitar that he would play when he studied. Sometimes he would prop his books up on the bed and sit on the floor and just look at them while he strummed. I didn’t exactly hate his guitar playing, but I didn’t exactly love it, either. Sly couldn’t stand country and western, which is what Colin played mostly.

  “Hey, man.” Sly was sitting with a towel wrapped like a turban around his head with a bowl of peanuts in front of him. “You ever get down with some real music, Colin?”

  Colin played a few bluesy bars and then slipped back into his country and western.

  “Can you play any George Benson?” Sly asked.

  “What are you doing with those peanuts?” I asked Sly. He was fooling around with them one by one.

  “I’m brushing the salt off of them,” Sly said. “All salt is cursed. It’ll kill you just like that!”

&nbs
p; “You out your mind,” I said.

  “Hey, Colin,” Sly went on, “really, can you play any George Benson?”

  Colin played a few bars from something and Sly got all excited. He told me to lay down some rhythm and I slapped my hand on a book and he started making a hornlike noise.

  “Yo, we can be good!” Sly said. “You can play guitar, Lonnie on skins, me on horn, and we’ll put my man Juice on bass.”

  “You read music?” Colin asked.

  “I don’t read it,” Sly said, closing his eyes, “I feel it floating through the universe.”

  “Reading helps,” Colin said.

  “What do you say, Lonnie?” Sly threw his sneaker toward me. “You want to start a group? We can be the Montclare Jazz Quartet.”

  “Does Juice play the bass?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Sly said, “but the dude looks like a bass player, don’t he?”

  “How about instruments?” Colin was interested, I could tell. “You have a horn?”

  “You have a guitar, that’s a start,” Sly said. “And I was checking out the music store in town. They got this jellybean counting contest. Whoever comes closest gets a free instrument.”

  “Naturally we’re going to win it.” I looked at Sly hanging over the side of his bed.

  “Naturally,” he said. “And with me as creative director, my man Colin as musical director, and Lonnie as business manager, we’ll be famous in about six months.”

  “How about Juice?” I asked.

  “He ain’t here, so we’ll make him equipment manager,” Sly said.

  The phone rang and it was Sherry asking if I wanted to walk her down to the track. I said okay and told her I’d meet her in front of the building.

  “Where you going, man?” Sly asked. “We’re having the first creative conference of the Montclare Jazz Quartet now.”

  “I’m walking Sherry down to the track,” I said, grabbing my jacket from the back of a chair.

  “Is she more important than the future of American music?” Colin asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “She got this little study group going. Half the people in it don’t show up most of the time. Anyway, she’s got this idea that if somebody reads you something from a book, it’s better than if you read it yourself. So she’s reading from the history book and I’m sitting there thinking that this girl might be more important than a lot of things.”

  “So what you’re telling me,” Colin said in this real serious voice, “is that you’re basically interested in the young lady’s intellectual ability.”

  I grinned.

  Sherry had the baddest warm-up suit I had ever seen. The material was white and fuzzy and made her look fat, which she wasn’t. She started over toward the track and she showed me how to use the stopwatch she had.

  “I want to run one-minute quarters,” she said. “What I have to do is to get the pace right.”

  We got to the track and she started doing stretching exercises. First she sat down and touched her head to her knees a few times, then she stood up and touched the ground with her palms.

  “You really have to warm up good in track,” she said, slipping out of her warm-up suit. “It’s so easy to tear a muscle. You wouldn’t mind helping me, would you?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Sit in front of me,” she said, sitting on the ground with her legs apart, “like this.”

  I sat on the ground in front of her with my legs apart and she put her feet against mine.

  “Now, I’m just going to push against you, okay?” She put her hands on the ground in back of her and lifted herself on the ground just a little as she pushed forward, stretching her legs farther and farther apart. “I’m not sure how flexible you are, so if I hurt you, let me know.”

  “Hey, this is just fine with me,” I said as she pushed herself even closer.

  “I usually do this with one of the girls on the track team,” Sherry said, half closing her eyes, “but they don’t do it as well as you do. Have you had a lot of practice stretching people out?”

  “I ain’t had no whole lot of practice, but this is definitely something I could get used to,” I said.

  “Bet you could, too,” she said, smiling.

  She got up before I could say anything else and started around the track. She went easily, clapping her hands in front of her every few steps. When she got back, she said she was ready for me to time her.

  As soon as she got on the track she seemed to change. All the cute little things she was doing with the stretching and peeling off the warm-up suit had stopped. She was all business.

  I checked the watch once more to make sure that I knew how to start it, then I got her on the mark.

  “Go!”

  She really took off. Her legs weren’t moving that fast, but her stride was long and graceful and I could see she had some power. I looked at the clock. She did the first half of the quarter in thirteen and a half seconds, and the second half in twenty-eight and a half seconds. I looked up and watched as she leaned into the far turn. Just past the turn she seemed to slow down a bit. She got the curve a little slow and then picked it up as she hit the top of the straightway, ending the quarter a second over one minute. She rested for a minute and then went again. She ran six quarters over the next half hour, finishing each within two seconds of the one minute she was shooting for.

  “Not bad, girl,” I said, when she finished what she had said was to be her last quarter.

  “I’m doing the first part of it too quickly,” she said. “I’m going to have to work on it.”

  She put on her top and threw me the pants to carry.

  “You look pretty good to me,” I said.

  “The coach wants me to switch to the four forty,” she said. “I don’t want to.”

  “How come?”

  “They want me and this Puerto Rican girl, Yolande, to run the sprints because they figure we’ll need less training than the white girls on the team for sprints. Everybody needs training for the mile, so they want to make us run sprints and them run the middle distances. But if you’re good, you have a better chance of making the Olympic team in the middle or long distances than you do in the sprints,” she said. “It’s better for the team, but it’s not better for me. It’s not even good for me.”

  “And you’re good,” I said.

  “I told you I was, didn’t I?” she said. She smiled, took her warm-up pants from me, put them on, and stretched out on the grass.

  “Yeah, yeah, you told me,” I said. “All I can see is how sweet you are.”

  “Lonnie, do me a favor, please. Don’t start it.”

  “Don’t start what?”

  “Don’t start hitting on me, okay? I mean just cool out.”

  “What’s all this mess? You running around talking about you going to get the brothers and the sisters together for a study group and all of this stuff and now I can’t even talk to you, right?”

  “I just don’t want to talk to you like that, Lonnie. Don’t you have an old lady at home, anyway?”

  “No, man, you know. I was kinda playing the field.”

  “I thought that all you New York guys had steady girlfriends,” Sherry said.

  “No, I think I made a big mistake when I was in the city. I was fooling around, fooling with this girl and that girl and then all of a sudden I found myself all alone and I didn’t want to be all alone. When I realized that I wanted somebody to be with, more than just the ‘hey, hey, how you doing’ kind of thing, I was ready to leave the city and come out here to Montclare. You know, I kinda wish I had somebody to write back home to. I bet you got an old man?”

  “No, I guess not.”

  “What do you mean you guess not?”

  “Well, I had a boyfriend in high school and we broke off over the last summer. He wanted me to go to Michigan State with him. I didn’t want to go to Michigan State and so he said that was the end of our relationship. It wasn’t that heavy anyway.”

 
“Why didn’t you want to go to Michigan State?”

  “ ’Cause that’s where he was going. That’s all. I mean, I spent two and a half years doing what he wanted to do. If he wanted to go to the movies, I went to the movies. If he wanted to go to the ball game, I went to the ball game. I just did not want to go to Michigan State, that’s all.”

  “It looks like we in the same boat, then,” I said. “Neither one of us has anybody heavy, so you know, maybe we can get together.”

  “Well, we’ll see.”

  She was still lying there on the grass and I reached over and put my fingertips against her lips. She flashed a quick smile and then rolled over and hopped to her feet.

  “Do you want to take a walk?”

  “No, why do I want to take a walk? What I really want to do is to kiss you.”

  “Lonnie, please, please. Can’t it be something light?”

  “Hey, man, what … I’m not good enough for you?”

  “I didn’t say that.… Look, I have a great idea. Why don’t you go back to the dorm or someplace.”

  “Yeah, okay, hey … no big deal, mama. You know, if that’s how you feel about it.”

  I got up and walked away. I went back to Orly, where Colin was still strumming his guitar. Sly was on the bed practicing cheating at cards.

  “Hey, Lonnie, come on and play me some aceydeucey.”

  “Man, get out of here,” I said to Sly.

  “Come on, Lonnie.”

  Sly took some one-dollar bills out of his pocket and threw them on the bed.

  “You could take all my money, man. Come on, Lonnie.”

  “I’ll play you one game,” I said, “for one dollar.”

  “Hey, now you talking, bro.”

  I sat down on the edge of the bed and watched Sly shuffle and deal the cards. He turned up an ace and a three for me.

  “You care to double your bet, man? That looks good.”

  Against my own better judgment I threw in another dollar. Sly turned over a deuce. Snatched up my two dollars and howled with laughter.

  I picked up the cards and threw them at him and then went and laid back on my bed. It bothered me what had happened with Sherry, because I knew she didn’t want me to hit on her and I just about knew that she was going to say no when I told her I wanted to kiss her. I had been thinking about Sherry a lot. Thinking about what I would say to her and how I would act around her. Colin was right, she was smart, I knew that. I could see that, but there was more, too. I wasn’t used to dealing with girls outside of a man-and-woman thing. I didn’t know how to just hang out and rap, or do casual things. It made me feel bad, in a way, and in another way it got me mad. I knew I wasn’t supposed to be mad at her, she didn’t do anything to me, but when I was with her I ended up feeling bad about myself.