by Michael W. Cox
It was August and I was dribbling a ball alone on the asphalt, settling into a zone where none might reach me, though I wanted to be reached—wanted someone to step inside that cage and challenge me to a game. I had just finished a construction job—my very first job, ever—and saved a little money for my freshman year at WVU, which would start in 15 days. Nixon had resigned on TV the day before, sweaty lip and all, and my father had died a few months before that, wasted by a thing that had invaded his gut and worked its way up into his brain. I was into being orphaned—half, anyway. It got me points somehow, explained away my sullen moods and made me mysterious to the pretty blondes I knew but wished I knew better.
My leather ball sounded good on the court, but the city park lay empty, just me at mid-day inside a tall cage. I hit my jump shot, 12 feet, then a quick fake and fadeaway, same spot. Anyone might see, I knew, so I styled and profiled and dazzled no one with a hook shot that made the net whisper my name. Or someone called my name, maybe, and I looked up toward the railroad tracks and saw a boy who’d graduated high school with me stumbling my way, down the gravel incline to where I was making leather do fantastic things. The boy hurried across the scrabbly grass and stepped inside the fenced court.
“You’ve got to help me,” he said. “I just busted jail.”
He wore a thin blue T-shirt, gray pants that were too big, grass-stained shoes, and I can still see the look on his face some 30 years after the fact, this boy who’d shared my homeroom 180 days a year the previous four. He was in trouble with the police, and I hadn’t even known. He was vague about what he’d done, and I can’t remember the vagaries now anyway. Something bad—a robbery, a housebreaking—but nothing awful, like a rape or killing or manslaughter.
“You broke out of jail?” I said, trying to get my mouth around the word. I couldn’t really imagine what his nights in jail had been like, the days, the routine, though I’d dribbled my ball past that jailhouse a million times when I had been younger and lived in a different part of town. The jail lay between my house and the ball court, and nothing, not the leering eyes or cursing words of an inmate out a window, nor the thrown rocks of the feral children who lived at the bend in the dogleg beyond, could keep me from my date and those hours spent worshipping unto the chain net.
But the boy from my school at the ball court—if I remember right, he was in tears, like your drunk uncle might do at the holidays when he looks at you and thinks of all the years you have in front of you, and all the ones he’s already pissed away. You walk away from your drunk uncle, perhaps, just a little bit embarrassed. But there on the court, a wet-eyed jail break in front of me, what move would I make? I wondered. Would I turn, callously, and sink a jump shot and say “tough shit”? Or would I just listen, not knowing what to do?
A train whistle blew up the river. It whistled again far upstream, a coal train with black freight that would makes its way, eventually, to the Ohio, headed for the steel plants up north—Wheeling maybe, Pittsburgh. The B&O was running a lot of coal in those days, more and more of it dug by machines, costing men good jobs and leading them to do bad things, occasionally, like knock off a gas station, sell drugs, or traffic in whores.
The boy babbled something about having just left our homeroom teacher’s house, a man who’d been our coach in high school. He lived down the tracks maybe half a mile from the park. Now there was a man of action, our teacher-coach, but that man had only told the boy to give himself up, to go back to jail, where the boy belonged, rightly, a ward of the county. And then our teacher, our coach, had slammed the door in the poor boy’s face, leaving him to wander, desolate, my way.
“Please,” he said. “Help me. I’m innocent, I swear.”
Those tears again, running down his face, falling down onto what must have been his county-issued shirt.
I’d stayed overnight with this boy once, a few years before. He’d tried to work himself into the starting line-up for the basketball team by cozying up to me, the coach’s favorite. We stayed in a cabin down by a stream, he and I and a few other boys. There might’ve been a bottle of wine involved, but I probably abstained, considering myself religious at the time. At one point that night he took us all down to the creek and jumped in and stayed under for five whole minutes, claiming there was an air pocket up under the tree on the edge of the bank. Apparently he was right, but he spent the rest of that night in the cabin cold, shivering in all his wet clothes.
Standing on the bank of the creek, a friend of his had called him a fool. I couldn’t dispute that, especially when I saw his head emerge, finally, in the flashlight I held for five long minutes. He was prone to try foolish things, like beg the first familiar face he saw for help after busting jail. I felt sorry for him, but the truth was, in the calculus of friendships and kin, he was far, far down the list, not much more than an acquaintance. Someone who quit the team when things didn’t fall his way. Someone who sat in the back of homeroom, yukking it up with one or two boys from up his way, far out in the sticks—pretty country, granted, but another world.
“I’m sorry, but I can’t help you,” I said. “I don’t even have a car here, if I’m supposed to get you out of town.” I gestured to the empty parking lot over by the restroom. I had no money either—not on me, not needing cash when all I had planned to do was shoot a little ball and lose myself in the game. The boy was beyond my range of assistance, unless I was supposed to lie for him or something—not that I would.
The tears dried up and the boy looked a little wild-eyed, plotting his next move maybe, or trying to think what one thing he could say to get me to help, to drag me out of my zone, but the more I thought about it, the more outrageous I thought it was that he would even approach me in the first place—better if he’d just kept moving along the tracks, eyes straight ahead, leaving me to catch a glimpse of his passing through town as I shot some ball, him in his world, on the run, and me in mine, the clean boundaries of the cage, with its easy rules and conversations.
Just over his shoulder I saw a police car moving down the hill. I was relieved, but I worked hard not to show it. The boy followed my eyes, and turned, and saw.
“Christ,” he said. “Coach called the police.”
It was a deputy car. It rolled slowly toward the cage. The deputy parked and got out and motioned to the boy.
“Shit,” he said.
He walked over to the car. The cop pointed my way, asking the boy who I was, and the boy just shook his head. The cop cuffed him and put him in the backseat and drove away. That was the last time I would see that boy, ever, but I didn’t know that at the time. I watched the deputy car disappear over the crest of the hill. Then I turned my back to the basket, faked right and dribbled left and shot from the side of the key. Soft, no spin, it slipped nicely down the metal net. It didn’t feel the same, even so.
Michael W. Cox has published nonfiction in such venues as New Letters, River Teeth, Kestrel, the St. Petersburg Times, and the New York Times Magazine.