Leave-Taking
The author in his college-playing days at Seton Hill.
by Noah Davis
Telephone poles give more than streetlights when a coach bus comes to rest at their base, and, at the moment, our bus’s wheels spin through six inches of wet snow on the steep incline before the driver, a woman in her mid-fifties, turns her head towards the side-view mirror and says Shit loud enough for my dozing teammates to sit up straight. Their silhouettes, ridged by beanies and headphones, flex and tense. The muscles along the sides of their stomachs, up beneath their arms and necks, twitch, then settle, not unlike the bus, which now sits at an odd angle against the grain of the road.
We left Edinboro University at 9:30 after a four-point victory in a basketball season that lacked victories. The thick band of snow moving west to east began at Cranberry, north of Pittsburgh. At midnight, still twenty miles from our small, Catholic, liberal arts college, it’s clear that PennDOT has not plowed. An hour later, we see that the city of Greensburg hasn’t done much better.
Expletives in the dark are not typically claimed, so our anger hovers in between the ceiling and seats like nervous flies dulled by cold against a screen window.
We wait for a response from campus police to see if they will shuttle us to our dorms, but by 2:30 we realize that our single security guard has likely found his way into the unlocked kitchen and decided to wait out the storm in the company of oatmeal raisin cookies.
First bell at the high school where I student-teach rings at 7:40. I sling my bags over my shoulder and side-step down the aisle to where my 74-year-old coach sleeps with his mouth open, breath holding his wrinkled lips till they quiver.
“Coach, Greensburg-Salem hasn’t called a two-hour delay yet.” He rubs his eyes and swallows what saliva has collected in the back of his throat.
“You’re going to walk in all this damn snow? It’s a mile and a half to campus.”
“I have boots.”
Every player and two assistant coaches join me. We clump out of the bus and step tentatively on the new snow as if we were a pack of skinny coyotes slinking along the edge of a field.
Half-dollar sized flakes soak the traffic light green, yellow, and red, and collect in the half-filled memory of yesterday’s skidded tire tracks. After the initial delight of release morphs to thrown snowballs and peeing in the middle of the street, we yield to the silence that a winter storm demands.
Negative space is revealed between us while we press our cold-seared faces into our collars, the quiet disturbed periodically by the odd slip and quick steps that follow a stumble. Some of us walk backwards, trusting the steps of those who came before. The houses are still, and I imagine people sleeping, our large framed shadows altering the light as it enters their rooms.
Snow gives the tension of tenderness between young men a texture. A tangible strain so powerful it can shift the conduction of heat. When Matt, our 6’8’’ third-string center, offers his scarf to Fernando, our 6’5’’ Brazilian small-forward, most of the team looks away. With a grace few men his size possess, Matt wraps the black cloth around Fernando’s neck like a monk’s robe.
At a young age, while watching my mother and godmother talk basketball, I realized that this was a sport of wonderful, subtle, often over-looked, physical tenderness. Yet as I grew, I found that my male teammates demanded that any tenderness be concealed in violence.
When I tense my chest in anticipation of an opponent’s muscle-ribboned shoulder as I set a screen, I do this out of love for my point guard who will make it to the basket uncontested. When I box out and move my man from the key so my teammate can grab the ball after a missed shot, this is also done out of love. We throw our bodies recklessly against others so we may hold the basketball together, forming a bond of adoration whose single direction ends at the orange rim, net draped like a holy cloth.
The original goals chosen by Dr. James Naismith were peach baskets. With the bottom of my sweatpants soaked and hands red from carrying my extra backpack, I think of the sticky juice each of us leaves on the ball as we pass it up the court on a fast break. Every selfless gift turning the nectar sweeter until we have no choice but to pause and thank each other for the cup from which we have all drank.
The guards draft behind the forwards as we turn onto College Ave. Terrell sets his gloved hand on Manny’s back when the wind banks off the buildings. Nathan grabs Anthony by the backpack as he slips in the snow so foreign to his Australian feet. We can see where the streetlights end, the dark beyond the railroad trestle, and even farther, the bottom of the college’s long driveway entrance, which marks the last half-mile to the promised warmth of our dorm rooms.
At the bottom of the hill, we stop and face the slope, the history of August wind sprints, dark sweat collecting in the waistbands of our shorts. On those oven-like days, our thighs would shiver from fatigue. A senior would slap a freshman’s bare chest in encouragement, recognizing the common suffering. The handprint would linger, water changing direction around the risen skin as we showered after practice.
In the swale that the college couldn’t fill because Coal Tar Run flooded every rain, I see the minutes-old tracks of deer who have now disappeared. These creatures move in a way only ungulates can. Legs governed by a single momentum. I imagine their bodies rippling across the white backdrop the way clouds do as they collide with hills.
Our collective breath hangs around our ears as we hesitate, afraid to leave each other, to interrupt this moment in a season of complacency and loss. Each of us focuses on staring past the sleet, hoping that the others also feel this fear, not to speak it, but to let it collapse on the covered pavement.
I wonder what will happen to our warmth as we slowly separate on the walk up the hill, and the days to come once the season ends.
Noah Davis grew up in Tipton, Pennsylvania, and writes about the Allegheny Front. His manuscript Of This River was selected by George Ella Lyon for the 2019 Wheelbarrow Emerging Poet Book Prize from Michigan State University’s Center for Poetry, and his poems and prose have appeared in The Sun, Best New Poets, Orion, North American Review, River Teeth, Sou’wester, and Chautauqua among others. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize by Poet Lore and Natural Bridge, and he has been awarded a Katharine Bakeless Nason Fellowship at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and the 2018 Jean Ritchie Appalachian Literature Fellowship from Lincoln Memorial University. Davis earned an MFA from Indiana University and now lives with his wife, Nikea, in Missoula, Montana.