Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

Nor did we discuss the women I sometimes brought home after about a year had passed. The women were good sports, and so was Duane. I would introduce them, and he would duck his head and step forward, blushing, and would shake their hand in his big fingers, then escape. He smiled at them, but not at me. And even after Cheryl stayed some months with me — with us, you’d have to say — we didn’t speak too much of her. She was the last. After Cheryl, it was Duane and me.

And I stopped telling him stories of how at fifteen I had been strong and tall, though smaller than he was, and able to run all day in two- and three-man half-court games in Brooklyn’s summer heat at Wingate Field. I wanted to tell him that I’d finally figured out why boys would play on blacktop courts from eight in the morning until the sun went down. It was because the other teams who challenged us would not only win the game: they’d win the court. It was winner-take-all, I wanted to say. Of course, he knew that.

I was careful to be silent about Duane’s own play. I watched him, though, as he practiced outside our house in the country hills. In cold autumn winds, in thick winter snow — he’d use a shovel and a push broom to clear the old dairy ramp outside the barn on which his backboard was mounted — Duane made lay-ups, sank his smooth jump shot from fifteen feet out, leaped again and again to cradle the rebounded ball so that his feet didn’t touch the ground until he’d rolled the ball over the rim. In games at his high school, against less muscular boys with fewer skills and less flexible bodies, he grew gawky, he — who could practice in a snowstorm all of an afternoon — became breathless, and then he ran with stiffening thighs and locked elbows; he would forget to set a screen for the shooting guard, he would neglect to block out opposing forwards and would yield up rebounds, he would panic when passed the ball and would shoot from too far out. And I, forgetting myself, would cry from the bleachers, “ Power move!” I would bellow, “To the hoop! Take it to the hoop !”

In game after game I saw his coach let him play fewer minutes. He came to sit on the bench more bunchily, hunched in upon himself as if hiding. At home he insisted on more silence about his play, and his grades began to slide — not enough to provoke a call from school, but enough for me to notice. I saw problems coming. They were the weather I watched for as if I farmed for a living, instead of running communications at the corporate offices they’d shipped me to from headquarters in Cincinnati. During the day, I ran our house organ, writing articles on management shifts and new products, consulting about publicity and community relations, lying for a living, trying hard to make it sound as if I told pure truth about stomach settlers and decongestants and the people who lived here in the center of New York State, with its harsh long winters and splendid, suddenly concluded summers, manufacturing pharmaceuticals and mourning for the Cincinnati symphony and civic theater, the movie houses and bus lines of a real city, as they called it. I watched with a cruel contentment as my colleagues drew their pleasure from tales of each other’s failures and malfeasances. I was a New Yorker. If I wasn’t there , then almost anywhere would do.

I called him Dude because that is what his teammates called him, slapping high-fives with the lazy slow-motion casualness they saw among black players on television. These boys were white, and their bodies knew, if their minds didn’t, or their tongues wouldn’t say so, that the dark grace they imitated was the standard for the toughness of their practice habits and the courage of their play.

In the car after a Tuesday night scrimmage, as I drove us home, I yawned and made a joke of my fatigue by stretching my jaws immensely and offering the noise of what I told him was an aging hippo in heat. On the unlit snowy country roads which glowed beneath our lights, then disappeared into the general dark behind us, he turned to me and said, in a low, controlled, and sullen voice, “Would you mind not shouting at me during the game?”

“Oh. Hey, I was shouting to you. You know, cheering for you.”

“I know. I kept looking at you. Did you see me?”

“I did. I thought you might be glad to know I was there.”

“It made me nervous. I played lousy. All six minutes he had me in there.”

“You looked a little tight.”

“I looked a little lousy.”

“Tentative, maybe.”

He didn’t answer.

“I meant, you didn’t seem to—”

“I know what tentative means.”

“Sorry. I will shut up. As long as you don’t think I was scolding you. I hate it when parents scold their kids on the court.”

“I think I’m screwing up because you’re there.”

I turned in at our short driveway. “You don’t want me to come, Dude?”

“And would you call me Duane, please?”

“I will. And I’ll stay away from games for a while. Right?”

“Thank you,” he said as formally as if I’d picked up his athletic bag and handed it to him.

“You’re welcome,” I said.

In the cold kitchen, while Duane turned that morning’s approximation of order into something shaggier, I lit a fire in the wood stove and made us sandwiches. We always ate some snack before he yawned his way through homework before going to bed. Seeing me slice ham, he said, “Nothing for me, thanks. I’m keeping my weight down.”

He was on the stairs, and something like “Good night” trailed his slow and heavy-footed climb. So I was alone, with ham and good intentions, and the usual fears that ranged from drugs to teenage schizophrenia. Jackie had died alone, and in silence. She had left us no word.

I put more wood into the stove, closed its damper, took off my jacket and tie, and sat with the day’s mail. Letters still, though rarely, came for Jackie and me, mostly flyers and occasional cards from people I’d forgotten. I sometimes thought of our lovemaking, or afternoons in shopping malls. But mostly, these days, I remembered Jackie’s rage. Once, when she was saying she hated having to love me, she had snarled — I’d seen her even teeth. With her face red and her teeth showing, she had sat before me. And then she had walked to the stove, bearing our cups, and had poured us more coffee. And then she had taken both our cups away, before we’d sipped, before she sat again, and had emptied them into the sink. She’d stood over it, with her back to me, and had said, “When I went to bed with you on Friday nights back then, this was not my idea of Saturday mornings.” She had left her Coach bags, and her printed personal stationery, and a basketball player who, when the ball was in his hands, grew wide of eye, twisted at the mouth, and leaden of limb.

I fell asleep in the kitchen, listening to the split cherry-wood sizzle and pop. It filled the air with sweetness. I could almost taste the wood, and it made me wish that Duane could. When I woke, the kitchen was cold. Duane and I were in the house, but that didn’t help either of us.

The next afternoon, late, when Duane met me in the school parking lot after practice, he threw his gym bag into the back of the car, dropped into his seat as if he’d been slung there, and he said, “I want to quit.”

“The team?”

He nodded.

“Why?”

“It isn’t any fun anymore.”

I drove us up into the hills. The sun was down, the sky was low and dirty-looking. It would snow, and the snow would stick, and in the morning we would have to dig the car out.

“We’ll need firewood brought in tonight,” I said.

“Will you let me?”

“Quit the team?”

“Yeah.”

He was big and handsome, my gaunt boy. His hair grew low on his forehead, and it was curly, and he hated it. He was always plucking at it, as if he could force it to straighten. I noticed him doing that on the court one night, before he told me not to come anymore. I saw that the worse he failed to set a screen or pass the ball off, the more he smoothed the hair on his neck, or pushed it alongside his temples, or repeatedly pulled at the ripples of his curls. Cheryl, who was ten years younger than I, and maybe ten years tougher, had said, “He’s as pretty as your wife must have been. He’s got a woo-woo body like you, but he’s as pretty as you are plain. Matter of fact, when I compare him to you, I wonder what it is you do have. You got legs,” she’d said. And when I’d looked down at my feet, Cheryl had said, “I mean legs . You keep on going. You last. You aren’t flashy, but you last. You know?”