S Rozan - Absent Friends

Markie flops down on his belly, sticks out his skinny arm. Jack grabs his hand. A wave comes. For a few seconds Jack disappears, comes back up sputtering, his eyes wild. Markie still has Jack's hand, but Jack's a lot bigger than Markie, Markie's just small and skinny and he can't pull Jack up, no way, but he keeps trying. Markie starts to slide across the rock, Jack pulling him down instead of him pulling Jack up, but Markie won't let go. Tom drops next to Markie, grips Jack's other arm with both hands. Jimmy plants his feet against a rock and grabs Markie's legs, keeps Markie from falling in. He pulls Markie and Tom pulls Jack, and finally Tom hauls Jack up.

Everyone ends up with skinned elbows or knees, bruises and bumps and cuts. Everyone's dripping wet. Jesus, Jack, says Tom.

Yeah, coughs Jack. Oh, shit, man, I can't breathe.

You can, says Jimmy, kneeling down so he can look right into Jack's eyes, Just in and out slowly, like always.

Jack's wild eyes skitter toward Jimmy, and he does what Jimmy says, he coughs and chokes, but he breathes in and out, in and out.

And then suddenly Jack grins. Anyway, he says, his voice raspy but tough again, almost Jack's normal voice. Anyway, look.

He sits, pulls something from the back pocket of his soaked jeans. The kids all lean around to look.

Jack coughs again, says, Some asshole lost his wallet.

He thumbs it open. Credit cards, a driver's license, pictures. From the billfold part Jack pulls out a fan of limp and soggy bills. He peels them off each other and he counts them. It's eighty-two dollars, more money than any of the kids have ever seen. They pass it around, so everyone can see how it feels.

After everyone's had a turn, Marian says, We have to give it back.

Jack yells, Are you crazy? Asshole was dumb enough to lose it, I almost got drowned going after it, Markie too. Screw him, let's go get ice cream. He waves the bills, which have come back to him.

But his license, Marian says. And his kids' pictures.

He's an asshole, Jack says.

Vicky looks at Tom. Everyone else does, too, even Jack; he scowls, but he waits for Tom to speak.

Tom says: Jack can keep the money. He says: It's not like the guy would ever get it back if Jack didn't climb down there.

Jack flashes Marian a grin and a big wink.

But we can give the wallet back, says Tom.

Hey, Jack says.

Tom says, What? You need pictures of his kids? You gonna take his Esso card and gas up the car or something?

Tom grins, and most of the other kids, and finally Jack does, too; it's a pretty funny idea, Jack pulling Mike the Bear's big Impala into the Esso station, sticking his head out the window, and hollering, Fill 'er up! Marian's the only one not smiling. She's looking at Jimmy, like this is a bad thing that happened and he's supposed to do something. But Jimmy's not so sure it's bad. What Tom says seems right to him, the whole thing seems fair. And for sure it's not bad enough to start a fight with Jack, who's pretending he doesn't care that all the kids saw how scared he was when he couldn't breathe. Right now, Jack's all lit up and promising everyone Eskimo Pies.

So Jimmy doesn't say anything. Marian, after a minute, looks away. She doesn't say anything, either. Vicky, she's smiling at Tom, and at Jack. Not just a regular smile, Jimmy thinks. Jimmy thinks Vicky looks the way his dad looks when they're watching a Mets game on TV, the Mets not doing so well, and Jimmy says, How come they don't take the pitcher out, put in a pinch hitter? And his dad says, Don't worry, Jim, Casey Stengel, he knows what he's doing. And Jimmy's not sure, but he waits and watches, and the pitcher singles, and the Mets score. And then Jimmy sees the same smile on his dad that he sees on Vicky now, looking at Tom.

Why doesn't Jack just leave? It's a big world out there, why doesn't he go see some of it?

Because Big Mike's saying, Soon. If Jack waits, Big Mike will set him up, get him his own operation, make him part of the machine. Guys, major guys, will have a beer with him, tell him what's what, in Atlanta, in Portland, wherever this happens.

And if he doesn't wait, if he leaves on his own, he's on his own.

It may come to that. It may have to. And it might be okay if it did, thinks Jack, except this: his mom. If Jack walks out on Big Mike, he doesn't come back, that would be the deal and he knows it. And his mom, this is what she's always been afraid of, Jack knows that, too. Jack did some weird, wild things when he was a kid, does some now, and he'd probably have done even more, played with fire, stuck his head in a lion's mouth, except for the way his mom always looked at him. Not mad, the way Big Mike gets, red and furious. His mom's eyes, when Jack does something loony and gets in trouble (this is how it was when he came back from New Haven), they're happy and sad at the same time. Like she knows something bad is coming for Jack, and she's glad, so glad, it wasn't this time.

Jack would have gone long ago, if his mom's eyes didn't look like that.

So Jack stays. He goes to the office, he runs his crew and hangs out. And waits.

Is he happy? Yeah, sure. Jack's happy.

October 31, 2001

Game over. Phil's team, 48-40. A fast-moving game today, a passing game, the ball getting four, five, six touches before anyone put up a shot: this on both teams. Under the shower in the echoing locker room, Phil thought about that, rifling through the game in his mind as through a card deck, picking out moments to look at again. He did this also with jury summations, with phone conversations: any situation could teach you something, lessons were everywhere if you looked for them. Most people didn't look. The reason behind that (because there was a reason behind everything)? Phil assumed it was this: most people didn't want to know they had choices. People loved the idea of doing what they had to do- God, his clients said that all the time. That was how they told him why they'd shot their sister's husband, why they'd snatched a woman's purse, why the whole damn crowd was cooking meth, wrapping it and dealing it from the nice frame house in Queens.

Had to.

No choice.

And by the time they came to Phil, the damn thing was, by that time, for a lot of them, it was finally true.

Toweling off, looking through the cards in his mind, Phil compared today's game to last week's, to the other games since September 11 and the games in August, in July, in days before.

Right after the attacks, in those first days, the Y was closed like so many places, and no one played games.

When the Y reopened early the next week, Phil and his teammates reassembled. They began again, as everyone tried to do.

Those first games were wild, lawless. People passed too hard or too far, fired up insane shots. No one set things up, no one was making plays. Then a strange thing: in the third game after, Terry the Ball-Hog (even Terry called himself that) made three great passes, two to Brian, who could really shoot, and the third to little Jane, who was cutting in for a layup. It was the right play, a play by the book, though Jane had no layup anyone had ever seen; and Terry, who never before in memory had given up a ball once he had his hands on it, passed for the third time that morning, and Jane took the shot. And missed it. But the next ball that came to her she sent to Brian, who swung it to Terry, and suddenly the passing game was under way, and they had never given it up.

Oh, they still ran the fast break when the chance came, they still posted up and cleared out for the big centers (on those mornings the big centers showed up), but this new thing, this was a team game. These last few weeks, Phil had seen this: the thrill of setting a teammate up in a smooth and beautiful play trumped the thrill of sinking a basket. Almost, it trumped winning.