SmokeLong Quarterly

It’s a cool, clear night in April, and I’m sitting on the asphalt beside a dozen other kids from the trailer park watching Larry Wooster, his lanky figure silhouetted—like that of a superhero flying across the sun—by the golden lights of his broken down truck, as he glide-dribbles around the chalk drawn court and practices turnaround jumpers and one-footed floaters and left-handed layups on a hoop with no net and no backboard. It’s hard to say what part of the crooked rim is really ten feet up like it’s supposed to be, the left side clearly higher than the right and the middle bent down like a fat lip, but from where I’m sitting, with a low angled view of the rusted hoop positioned just beneath the Milky Way, Larry’s high flying finger rolls might as well have grazed the moon.

“Can you do a windmill?” yells out Matt, who in school never raises his hand, never so much as looks at the teacher unless spoken to first—usually to be instructed to open his book or to quit staring out the window—but now he’s enthralled. By all the possibilities in Larry’s legs. By how far they might take him. And us too, somehow.

Larry obliges, stepping up to the free throw line and then flying toward the hoop, winding his arms over his head, and slamming the ball with two hands, so powerfully that the ball bounces back up and hits the bottom of the rim, before heading my way. I grab it just as it’s about to tap the trailer behind me, the one belonging to my older brother Rex and me. Rex is working late at the convenience store, but he’ll know if the ball touches the trailer—if its impact, however slight, at all echoes inside his room, moves a dime on his dresser a quarter inch, shakes a dust mote into the air—the way he always knows if I use the microwave while he’s away, no matter how hard I scrub, as if a part of him remains ever present, even when his body leaves. My friend Aaron has a theory—one that makes some sense given how miserable, pale, and tired Rex always is—that maybe Rex’s credit was so horrible that he had to use his soul as collateral for the trailer, and now his soul is trapped in the walls until he pays it off. Aaron’s dad dated an accountant for a year and during that time Aaron moved to a nice apartment in Tulsa and learned about collateral and tax write offs and hotels with continental breakfast. But tonight, though he’s wearing his two-buttoned shirt he insists cost more than my shoes, he’s back here with the rest of us, watching our local dirty blonde god with desperate eyes, celebrating each rim-bouncing make like an answered prayer.

I rotate the ball in my hands, feel its perfect smoothness, any semblance of grip long since worn away by days spent pounding it over rocks and crevices and the unforgiving heat of summer asphalt. I pass it back to Larry, and for a moment I’m on his team, his point guard. His next shot, I tell myself, is my assist. Larry takes my pass and dribbles to the left wing and nails a fade-away, and though he doesn’t look my direction, doesn’t point at me the way he points at his real teammates after receiving a perfect lob or pretty fast break bounce pass, I’m now officially on the scoresheet, forever a footnote in the story of a legend. Forever someone.

In sixth grade, my friends and I join Newspaper Club to avoid paying the three dollars it costs to watch varsity, and so from seven to nine some school nights, we sit at the top of the packed bleachers in the muggy gym pungent with the smell of onion burgers from the food truck outside, scribbling notes about Larry’s sensational senior year, his winning hook shot against North, his acrobatic reverse layup against Jefferson, his alley-oop dunk in the first half against Fallbrook. We walk home with our jackets tied around our waists, warm with adrenaline despite the chilly late fall air, our shoelace and paperclip bound press passes dangling wildly from our necks as we cross each other over with imaginary basketballs.

Now, it’s eleven o’clock on a stormy Wednesday night, over an hour after I’ve returned from watching Larry miss two free throws in the final seconds against Watson Charter, and I’m sitting at the kitchen table doing math homework while Larry’s outside punishing himself with postgame practice, the combination of the repetitive rhythm of his free throw routine dribbles and the rain hitting our roof composing a familiar kind of music I long ago learned how to work through, sleep through, dream through. But Rex, who mans the morning shift tomorrow, is livid at Larry’s noise, swinging his bedroom door open with such force that it slams against the wall as he barges into the kitchen in only his underwear and glares outside with narrowed eyes, clenching his fists as if this time he’s really had enough, as if this time he might grab his baseball bat, might go out there and break Larry’s knees and end everyone’s hopes, as if he might make a name for himself that way. But instead he simply stands in front of the window shaking his head and cursing under his breath not just Larry but everything about this place, the sides of his shadowed face striped by thin slats of yellow light from between the blinds that glimmer over his pale skin like magic scars, or, I imagine—as the fuzzy outline of his mid-back birth mark reminds me of latching onto his sunburnt shoulders on summer lake days, as suddenly the dribbling stops and the cursing stops and all that’s left is our breathing and the rain—like tiny slivers of his soul he managed to save.