Night Hoops (8 page)

"That's something like it," O'Leary grumbled, after he'd read the letter slowly and carefully. "Although whoever taught you handwriting should return his paycheck to the state." He looked up. "All right then, that's over with. Get out there and play." As Trent hustled onto the court, O'Leary shouted after him. "And keep that mouth of yours shut!"

You look back at little things and wonder if maybe they aren't so little. I was absolutely certain that was the first time Trent had ever apologized to anyone in his life, and O'Leary had made him do it twice. Looking at Trent, you could see that inside he was all torn up, afraid he'd lost face. It wouldn't have taken much to set him off, and if there'd been a second blowout, it would have been the last one.

It was an important day of tryouts. O'Leary had put my team up against a team that had Carver, Fabroa, and McShane. No more than a minute into the game Trent ripped down a defensive rebound. He fed me with a quick outlet, exactly the way Coach O'Leary wanted. I raced the ball right up the center of the court. Luke filled the lane on my left and Trent was on my right.

I could have fed Luke. He was open, and he'd had a big game the day before. But Trent was open too, and he deserved the ball. Or maybe I should say he needed the ball. I feathered a soft pass to him.

He soared for the lay-in. The ball hung on the lip of the rim, and for a second I wasn't sure it was going to drop. But then it did, and once that ball went through the hoop, it was as if the knots that had been tying him up were suddenly cut. He gave me his crooked smile—something I never thought would come my way.

After that Trent ran the court like a demon, crashed the boards harder than ever, and swished the jump shot I'd seen him practicing in the moonlight. With Luke hot from behind the three-point stripe, and with me dishing out assists to both of them, we steamrolled those varsity guys, controlling the court and everything that happened on it. Our dominance was so complete that Matt Markey actually went after Luke, fouling him hard on a breakaway and then standing over him, fists clenched, glowering. But Luke played it cool, simply standing up and walking away, making Markey looking so foolish that O'Leary laughed.

As we walked home on Friday, Luke turned to me. "What do you think, Nick? He can't cut us, can he?"

"No way," I said. "We're a lock."

He grinned. "I think so too. But I can hardly wait until Monday."

We talked about O'Leary for a while, and what it would be like to play for him. Then Luke brought up Trent. "I think he'll make the team, thanks to you. You made him look like a star, and O'Leary likes his aggressiveness."

"He's good enough, but he flunked a whole bunch of classes last year, and he's flunking a whole bunch this year. You can't play if you don't pass, can you?"

Luke shook his head. "Not where I came from."

Dad came by Sunday. He took me to the Kaddyshack Driving Range in Lynnwood. Neither of us is any good at golf, so we hacked away at the balls and talked. While we were hitting our second buckets, I told him I thought I'd made the team.

"What do you mean 'You
think'?
"

"I won't know for sure until Monday. That's when they post the roster."

He tilted his head. "You know already, Nick. A player always knows. So did you make it, or didn't you?"

I swallowed. "I made it."

He reached over and rubbed the top of my head. "That's my boy!" Then, in a more serious tone, he continued: "You remember what I said about the final shot. If you get the chance, you step up and take it. Don't be thinking that just because you're a sophomore you've got to pass to some senior. You be the man."

After we finished hitting golf balls, we ate fish and chips at the Ivar's at Bothell Landing. I hoped we'd do something after lunch, maybe bike the trail again, but he drove me home. "I've got to talk to your mom," he said after we stepped inside the front door. "Business."

I climbed upstairs and turned on the Sonics-Kings game. But underneath the play-by-play I could hear the two of them arguing about support payments and lawyers. After about an hour, I heard the pick-up drive off. He hadn't even said goodbye.

I made the team. When I saw my name on the list, I felt exhilarated, but it wasn't like winning a million dollars. Dad had been right—a guy does know where he belongs. As Luke and I stared at the list, it was as if we were both checking on something that we knew had to be.

We'd stared at our names for a minute when I spotted Trent's name at the bottom of the page with an asterisk after it. "What do you think that means?"

"Grades, I'll bet. Just like you thought."

"You think he'll hit the books now? Somehow I can't see Dawson studying."

Luke shrugged. "Give the guy some credit. You never thought he'd stick through tryouts, either."

Practice was different from tryouts, and it wasn't just that there were twelve guys where there had been thirty. During tryouts, O'Leary had stood back and watched us play. At practice he had every minute orchestrated. The run-and-gun showtime stuff was over. We stretched; we ran; we did passing and fast-break drills. Then came a chalk talk.

O'Leary knew the game in a way that no other coach I'd ever had knew it.
Double-downs, rotation to the ball, weakside help—he
explained all those things you hear about on television but don't really understand. And he explained not only what they were, but also how to do them.

When the chalk talk ended, we walked through the plays we'd learned. Then we had a controlled scrimmage—which means he blew the whistle every time somebody made a mistake, which was about every ten seconds. After that we ran more fast-break drills, had another chalk talk, and ran some more. We hardly had time to breathe, let alone think, before O'Leary was saying: "All right, gentlemen, that's it for today. Remember, on time tomorrow and every day. No excuses."

During practice Trent had had to do all the grunt work—the stretching, the running, the fast-break drills. When it came to the fun part, the actual scrimmaging, he was off to the side,
forgotten, used only when somebody needed a rest. It made sense. He wasn't eligible, so why waste precious practice time on him? Still, it had to be rough.

And what happened after practice had to be rough, too. As soon as O'Leary blew the whistle, he led Trent into his office and sat him down at the desk in there. While the rest of us showered and shot the breeze, Trent was in that little room—still wearing his gym clothes—doing his schoolwork. When Luke and I walked out of the locker room and across the gym to go home, he was still there, sitting in his sweats with his head over a book.

I went home, ate some dinner, did my homework. By nine-thirty I was beat, absolutely exhausted. I lay on my bed and turned on the radio, too tired to do anything else. And it was right about then that I heard a basketball being dribbled in the back yard, heard Steve Clay and Trent talking in their low voices.

I was amazed. Where did Trent find the energy? I don't know how long they stayed that night, or on the other nights either. Not even the constant
thump, thump, thump
of a basketball on concrete could keep me awake.

Our opening game was on a Thursday in early December. By the end of practice on Tuesday my legs were totally dead. As we dressed in the locker room I moaned to Luke about all the running O'Leary was having us do. "You'd think we were on a track team."

"It's a good sign for us," Luke said softly.

"What do you mean?" I asked, my voice dropping to a whisper.

"Simple. Last year's team always walked the ball up the court and ran a set offense. They weren't a running team. Right?"

"Yeah. That's true. But so what?"

"Don't you get it? O'Leary's changing his style. Fabroa can't run like you can; Matt Markey can't keep up with me. If we play up-tempo ball, those guys are on the bench and we're on the court."

My pulse quickened. "You really think so?"

"I know so. If we show O'Leary we can handle the pressure, we'll be first string by the end of the week."

I'd been figuring to play six or eight minutes a game. But Luke was talking about more. And why not? In my heart I knew I was better than Fabroa, that Luke was better than Markey. So what if they were seniors? Those guys had had their chance last year, and they'd done nothing with it. Ten wins, twelve losses. It was our turn.

"You ready?" Luke said.

I laced up my second shoe. "Yeah. Let's go."

As we left the locker room, I looked over to the coaches' office. But instead of seeing Trent with his head over some book, I saw a policeman sitting at O'Leary's desk, his nightstick jutting out from his hip. Trent was talking, and as he talked he was shaking his head back and forth vigorously. Both Luke and I stopped and stared. Coach O'Leary caught us staring, which immediately made us hustle out the door.
"I wonder what that was all about?" Luke murmured once we were outside.

When I reached home, there was more. "You missed all the excitement," Scott said as soon as I stepped inside.

"What are you talking about?"

"Zack Dawson. Two police cars came roaring up our block about an hour ago. It was quite a scene. One cop went around the back. The other knocked on the front door. They were inside for about ten minutes, then they led Zack away—in handcuffs. Mrs. Dawson was screaming at them from the front porch, calling them every name in the book. I'm telling you, it was something."

As he spoke I felt myself going pale. "What did he do?"

Scott shrugged. "How should I know? Stole something, probably. Or drugs. There are about a million things he could have done." He stopped, then looked at me. "What's wrong with you?"

"Nothing's wrong with me," I snapped, suddenly angry. "But there's something wrong with you. You act happy to see Zack get arrested."

His back stiffened. "Since when have you been big buddies with Zack Dawson? It seems to me a couple months ago he almost killed you."

"I'm not big buddies with Zack Dawson, or with Trent. But it doesn't make me happy to see them get in trouble. And I don't see why it should make you happy either."

I pushed past him and went to the kitchen, pulling the door closed behind me. I grabbed some Oreos and milk from the refrigerator, and then sat down and ate.

In eighth grade our class had gone on a field trip to the juvenile detention center. Before we'd gone, I'd figured the place would be a dump, with busted toilets and graffiti on the walls, like something from an old movie. But it was the opposite—spotlessly clean and modern, with a nice basketball court, a computer lab, a big library.

That was the first shock. The second was that the kids locked up in there didn't look that different from me. They were a little older, but not much. They wore orange jumpsuits and laughed loudly with one another as they moved from one room to the next. You could have told yourself they were having fun if it weren't for the double set of doors that locked them in and the guards that stood at those doors. Before we left the guides showed us the rooms the kids slept in. They were tiny little rooms, bare and cold. It spooked me to think that Zack was in one of those rooms.

I had to do something, so I went out to the basketball court. It felt good to pick up the basketball, to eye the hoop. I knocked down a three-pointer, retrieved the ball, and knocked down another one. That was more like it. I worked the ball between my legs, behind my back, controlling it as though it were a yo-yo on a string. I blocked out everything except the season coming up, the game on Thursday, and the minutes I was going to play.

After dinner I sat at my desk. Instead of doing my homework, I put my pencil down and listened to the sounds of the night. A car on 104th. A fire truck somewhere far off. Another car. Some dog, barking his fool head off. Something felt wrong.

Then it hit me. It wasn't any new sound that had thrown me off; it was a missing sound. Trent wasn't practicing with Steve Clay.

The Dawson house was shut up tight the next morning, and Trent wasn't at school either. Rumors floated around. Someone said Zack and Trent had been shooting a gun down by the trail. Somebody else said that they'd stolen a bunch of guitars from Mills Music. There was talk of broken windows at the school district offices, and swastikas painted on the outside of a synagogue in Redmond.

At practice Coach O'Leary stayed in his office while we ran through warm-ups. We could see him in there talking on the phone. When he finally came out, he called us together. "What do you bet Trent Dawson's no longer on this team?" Carver whispered as we shuffled over to O'Leary.

"You got that right," McShane agreed softly.

O'Leary's normally cheerful face seemed topsy-turvy. The corners of his mouth were down and his eyes drooped. He waited for absolute silence before he began.

"I won't beat around the bush. You know the police were here talking to Trent after practice yesterday. The long and the short of it is that they took him into custody. I spoke with Trent last night and again today, and he has given me his word that he has done nothing wrong. I accept his word, and I fully expect that when the investigation is over he will be cleared and that he will return to this team." He paused. "Any questions?"

Every one of us wanted to know
what
was being investigated, but nobody had the courage to ask.

"All right then," O'Leary said. "Let's get to work."

It was our last practice before the season started, and it was our worst. Guys were chirping at each other, acting more like opponents than teammates. Every time the gym door opened O'Leary stared toward it. When the two hours ended, it was like being released from the dentist's chair. Not exactly the way to start a season.

The next night, we opened the season against the Juanita Rebels at their gym. They had decent players at every position, and they had an all-star at guard, a six-four guy named Matthew Jefferson. When I played, I'd be guarding him.

There was no practice on game days, so as soon as school ended I walked straight home. Once I reached my block, I sneaked a peek over at the Dawson house. The shades were down; the curtains drawn. It looked like a house with a sick person in it.