Craig Davidson - Rust and Bone - Stories

Meander down the sidewalk checking out the games. The majority are tactless, bulling affairs: guys heaving off-balance threes and clanging running one-handers off the front iron, banging bodies under the boards for ugly buckets. It’s really quite a painful ordeal for me: a classically trained pianist watching chimpanzees bash away on Steinway pianos. Stop to watch an old-schooler with Abdul-Jabbar eyegoggles and socks hiked to his knees sink crafty hook-shots over a guy half his age; the young guy’s taking heat from his teammates for the defensive lapses.

The final court has drawn a huge crowd; can’t see more than flickering motion between the tight-packed spectators, but from what little I do it’s clear this is serious. A true student of the game can tell right off: something about those confident movements, that quickness, the conviction that lives in each and every gesture.

Push through the crowd and there’s my son.

He’s at the top of the three-point arc. Long black hair tied back with a blue rubber band, the kind greengrocers use to bind bunches of bananas. Apart from giving you the look of a pansy, long hair has a habit of getting in a shooter’s eyes. But the boy refuses to cut it so one time I chased him around the house with a pair of pinking shears, screaming, Swear to Christ I’m gonna cut that faggot hair off ! I was gassed at the time; you tend to do crazy things when you’re gassed. He locked himself in the bathroom. I told him I’d cut it off as he slept. He passed the night on the floor, those hippie locks fanned out over the pissy tiles.

He takes the ball at the top of the key and bounces a pass to Al Cousy, a thick-bodied grinder on Jason’s high-school team. Al’s a bruiser with stone hands who’s going nowhere in the sport. Way I see it, the sooner he comes to grips with this, the sooner he can make an honest go at something more suitable: he’ll make a great pipefitter with those strong mitts. However it works out, years from now Al can say, hunched over beers or gutrot coffee at some union meeting, he’d once played ball alongside Jason Mikan—yeah, that Jason Mikan.

Al pivots around his defender, gets blocked, shovels the ball out. Jason catches it a few feet beyond the three-point line, throws a head-fake to shake his defender, steps back and lofts a shot. The ball arcs through sparkling June air, a flawless parabola against a blue-sky backdrop, dropping through the center of the net.

“Nice bucket!” I call out. “Thattaboy!”

Jason looks over, spots me, glances away and claps his hands for the ball.

Watching that shot, the unstudied perfection of it, I think back to all the time we spent practicing together. Every day in good weather we’d be out on the driveway hoop, shooting until the sun passed behind the house’s high peaked roof. Before Jason could quit he had to make fifteen foul shots in a row; he’d sink twelve or thirteen easy before getting the jitters. I even built a pair of defending dummies, vaguely human plywood cutouts with outstretched arms. These I mistakenly destroyed: stumble home less than sober and spy two menacing shapes in your unlit garage—who wouldn’t kick them to splinters? One night I came back a little greased and dragged Jason out of bed. It was cold—had to knock a glaze of ice off the net—Jason there in his pj’s and I chucked him the ball. Every minute you’re not practicing is a minute some other kid is. You got to work, son—hard and every day. Now can that fucker! My neighbor Hal Lanier, beetle-legged and bucktoothed, sidled out onto his front stoop.

“Hey,” he said. “You two mind calling it a night?”

“What business is it of yours, bud?”

Hal pulled a housecoat shut over a belly pale as a mackerel’s. “Trying to sleep, is my business. Got your boy out here in his fuggin’ jammies, screaming like a lunatic, is my business.”

“Telling me how to raise my kid?”

“Telling you I got kids of my own trying to sleep.”

“Why not come say that to my face, ya fat prick ya.”

I’ll admit to being a bit surprised when Hal took me up on this offer, crossing the frost-petaled lawn in his slippers to where I stood in my grease-smudged overalls, hitting me square in the face. Well! Down on the grass we go, rolling around chucking knuckles. Shoot that goddam ball! I kept screaming at Jason. Fifteen foul shots before you go back to sawing logs!

Jason’s team is up 20-13 when he hits a fadeaway jumper from the elbow to win. The teams shake hands and head to the sideline, gathering duffels and water bottles. I trot over to Jason, who’s speaking to a guy with a clipboard. For a moment I’m struck dumb with terror at what appears—and I feel a distinct need to stress this—what appears to be a cone of ghostly flame dancing atop the man’s bald head. Whoa!

“Hey,” I say a bit shakily, “great game there, kiddo.”

“Yeah,” says Jason, “thanks.”

“This your father?” The fire on clipboard-guy’s head is now mercifully extinguished. “Your son’s a helluva player.”

“Don’t think I don’t know it.” I clamp a hand around Jason’s neck, give a friendly squeeze. “Gonna redefine the game, this kid. Aren’t you?”

Wincing, Jason shrugs out of my grip. “When do we play next?”

“Championship game goes in about forty-five minutes.”

“Alrighty then,” I say once clipboard-guy has wandered off. “What do you say me and you grab a bite to eat before the big game.”

“I don’t know. We were gonna set things up—defensive assignments, rotations, that sort of thing.”

Dart a glance at Jason’s teammates, big Al and lanky Kevin Maravich. “Boys don’t mind if I steal this guy for a bit, do you?”

The two of them shrug in that mopey skeptical way kids their age have: as though, instead of asking could I take Jason to lunch, I’d suggested enrolling him in seminary college.

“Great! Have him back in time for the game. Honest injun.”

WE HEAD TO THE MIKADO and find seats on the patio. Afternoon sunlight hits the scalloped glass tabletops, splintering in blazing pinwheels and fanwise coronets. Tempered light falls through the patio umbrella, touching the beaded perspiration on Jason’s upper lip.

Lola’s dog, a nasty-looking Rottweiler chained to the wrought-iron patio fence, yammers as its owner waddles outside.

“Back again, misser?” Lola’s sun-blotting bulk towers above me, Lola tapping a toothmarked Dixon Ticonderoga against an order pad. “What’ll y’have?”

“A Bud and a shot a rye. This fella’ll have a Bud, too.”

“He gots ID?”

“Dad, I got a game.”

“Sweet Jesus, Lola, he’s got a game!” Suddenly I’m angry—furious, really—at Lola for permitting my son to drink before a ball game. “Get him a Coke and a grilled cheese—you do grilled cheese, don’t you?”

“Kin whip one up.”

“Fine. Wonderful.” Shake my head, disgusted. “He’s got a game, for Christ’s sake. The championship .”

Lola shrugs and wanders off to fill the order. I say, “Hey, got any grape soda?”

“Nope,” Lola says without turning back. “Coke and ging-a-ale.”

I wink at Jason. “Never hurts to ask. Know how much you love your grape pop.”

An inside joke of ours. A few years back Jason and some buddies had a pickup game going when I returned from a morning shift. Head to the kitchen for something to wet the whistle and on the counter spy a bottle of grape pop I’d bought earlier that week— dead empty . Don’t know why, but this pissed the almighty hell out of me; guess maybe I’d been thinking about it at the drill press—a tall cool glass of grape soda, all purple and bubbly. Sounds ridiculous, but at the time I could’ve spat nails and thundered outside brandishing the empty bottle.