Racing the Rain (7 page)

“He ran pretty hard,” Cassidy said.

“You didn't give him much choice.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now, Chip's never run anything longer than a 220 in a meet, but a 60 flat quarter mile would win some of our dual meets. And if you can push beyond that a bit, you might just give Demski something to think about in the 880. He's just getting started, but he's getting to be pretty darned tough. I want you to think about that. If you came out for track at the end of March, I think you might do very well.”

Cassidy wasn't sure what to think. He had always pinned his hopes for glory on basketball. Other than Chip Newspickle and Ed Demski, the track team was notorious for being a scut bucket of misfits and rejects.

“I really want to play basketball,” he said.

“I read you. Your prerogative entirely. But it's not an either-or situation is all I'm saying. I just want you to think about it. Will you do that for me?” Then he actually smiled. Cassidy had never seen him smile before.

“Yes, sir! I will.”

“Okay, go ahead and take off. You're going to be late to third period. If you get any grief, tell them you had a conference with me.”

Bickerstaff started taking papers off the top of the stack on his desk, reaching for his reading glasses.

“Yes?” he said, looking up. Cassidy was still by the door.

“What's the school record for the 880?” Cassidy asked.

“You probably shouldn't be too concerned about—”

“I just wanted to know,” Cassidy said.

“Son, it's 2:07.3. That's a tick under two sixty-four-second quarters back to back. I know that sounds awfully—”

“I can run faster than that,” Cassidy said, and left.

Bickerstaff stared at the door. What was it with this kid? He started reading the first letter but stopped after the first paragraph and took off his glasses.

What the hell
, he thought,
maybe he can at that.
Bickerstaff looked over at the small black-and-white photograph of himself and his teammates from all those years ago. There was a fierce and familiar look of determination on the face of that strange-looking, Dumbo-eared child.

T
hey were shooting at a netless hoop at their old elementary school, and Stiggs and Randleman were acting more than a little pissy.

They had seen people smiling at Cassidy in the hallways. A couple of guys had actually stopped by their table at lunch to make some wisecracks and it was obvious they were including Cassidy in their ribaldry. Stiggs and Randleman, as starting forwards on the basketball team, were accustomed to tolerating Cassidy as a goofy sidekick. They allowed him in their pickup games because he was a warm body and he was always available.
They
were actual stars, whereas he was a mascot. This new status of his was not sitting well.

“I heard Chip had a charley horse in his leg,” said Stiggs, shooting up a brick that clunked in the dead spot between the back of the rim and the backboard before rolling forward into the basket. Their attempts at ego deflation had been going on for some time.

“Yeah,” said Randleman, driving to his left, faking a jump shot, then reversing and making a short hook. “Or a side stitch or something.”

“Somebody said he was sick. His mom had to take him to the hospital,” Stiggs said.

“Funny he didn't mention it,” said Cassidy. “And he came back from the hospital with braces on his teeth.” He knew better than to rise to the bait, but couldn't help himself. He dribbled out to the foul line, turned, and heaved up a hopeless brick of a two-handed set shot that missed everything.

“Swish!” he proclaimed. “Jerry West scores again!”

“Yeah, right,” said Stiggs. “More like an air ball. He snagged the ball out of the air and started his own voice-over: “. . . Bill Russell with the rebound and he's bringing it up the court himself.”

Randleman lunged at the ball and got a fingertip on it, but Stiggs recovered and kept up his banter as he turned at the top of the key and headed back toward the hoop.

“Time running down with the score tied ninety-five–all. Twenty seconds left and Cousy is covered, K.C. is covered, Russell takes it himself down the key . . .”

Cassidy swiped at the ball as he went by, but Stiggs did a smooth crossover dribble and left him flailing at empty air as he laid the ball gently on the backboard for an easy bucket.

“The crowd goes . . .” Stiggs began.

“. . . wild . . .” said Cassidy, grabbing the ball, “. . . but maybe too soon, because Jerry West takes the inbound pass and is bringing it up the floor with just five seconds left . . .” Cassidy was dribbling back to the foul line, dodging nonexistent opponents.

“But it's
too late
because . . .” said Stiggs.

“. . .
Almost
too late as he shoots his famous jump shot from the top of the key . . .” said Cassidy.

The “jump shot” was the same two-handed set shot but with an added little hop at the end. Again, it touched nothing, but it was much closer than the last one and may have even gone in.

“Swish!” said Cassidy.

“But the referee ruled the shot was not in time . . .” said Stiggs, chasing the ball as it bounced under the basket and off the court.

“But then the
other
referee overruled him and said the shot was good and the game was over and the Lakers win! The end, and good night!” Cassidy grabbed the ball out of Stiggs's hands and thrust his face up at the bigger boy.

“Drive carefully, folks,” Cassidy said.

Stiggs slapped the ball away from Cassidy and began dribbling back toward the foul line.

“But then the
other
other referee put two seconds back on the clock and . . .” Stiggs was not giving up yet.

“NOOO!” said Cassidy and Randleman together. Randleman, like Cassidy, was a Lakers fan, plus he maintained that these imaginary contests should adhere to a few very basic laws of physics.

“. . . and Russell does his world-famous hook shot . . .”

“No, he already got you,” said Randleman.

“. . . and it's up and it's . . .”

But Cassidy and Randleman were already fetching their T-shirts.

“. . . just short,” said Stiggs, conceding finally. He undid the strap from his black Buddy Holly glasses and wiped the sweat from his eyes with his shoulder as the other two raced to the water fountain.

After they had thoroughly waterlogged themselves, they sat on the picnic table by the monkey bars and contemplated their tight, water-balloon bellies. Still a little red faced, Stiggs was lying on his back on the tabletop, his skinny legs dangling off the end, watching the fast-moving orange clouds moving across the south Florida sky.

Randleman tried to interest them in the dingy cigarette stub he had salvaged from his dad's ashtray, but no one was in the mood. All three felt the palpable stillness of stopped kid time that comes at twilight, when the day is over but night hasn't quite begun. Those in-between moments seemed to exist separate and apart from the rest of time; they sensed this intuitively and always tried to make them last.

So now they lolled about, putting off the moment they would have to collect themselves and pedal the mile and a half back to Rosedale Street.

No one wanted to be the one to call it, though. Randleman slouched backward on one bench, studying his old sixth-grade classroom, where Mr. Meredith had once awakened him from a sound midmorning nap with a well-aimed eraser. Stiggs was still on his back but no longer watching the clouds. Stiggs's eyes were almost shut, as if he were dozing off. But then he said, softly:

“Imagine that. I bet ol' Chip Newspickle was
surprised as
hell.
”

T
he sun was just climbing out of the ocean beyond the far end of the Singer Island bridge. The fat tires of Cassidy's old Schwinn buzzed pleasantly on the heavy metal grating of the drawbridge as he pedaled across, using a splay-footed style to keep from banging his knees on the zinc bucket hanging from his handlebars.

He wasn't concentrating particularly well and thus whacked a knee every now and then. The warmth of the early sun was nicely balanced by the salty breeze from the intracoastal waterway, inducing a kind of numb-brained kid euphoria. It was Saturday and midwinter was finally beginning to leaven the tropical misery. The sandy halls of Glenridge Junior High seemed a million miles away.

Air Force beach was deserted. He left his bike and trudged laboriously through the powdered sugar of the dunes to the top, setting his bucket down and looking out across the glittering panorama of the Atlantic Ocean. The bottoms of his feet were tough, but the soft sand was already hot around the edges as he stood there, feeling a little thrill of greed as he peered through the cattails and saw water dappling with life in the shallow tide pools. Today he would be a successful capitalist.

He removed the little cast net from the bucket and waded into the shallow tide pool, biting down daintily on one salty fold as he untangled the lead weights and separated the folds of netting.

He blew the first cast as usual. The net flattened in the air, forming a nice oval momentarily, but the timing was off and it bounced back into an inefficient hourglass shape before it landed. Only a few of the unluckiest fish were under it. He frowned in distaste as he tugged in his meager haul.

Sitting by the edge of the pool, he scooped some water into the bucket and began picking the jittery fry out of the netting, making his hands form oval pincers to avoid the dorsal fins. It was perfect kid work, requiring a modicum of skill and a lot of patience. The downtown businessmen, lawyers, and doctors who would later purchase these little fish for bait were probably capable of getting them themselves but mostly couldn't be bothered. Cassidy considered himself lucky to have found one of those happy interstices in the economy where an alert underage entrepreneur could actually make a buck.

Though it was still cool, he could already feel the sun cranking up across a thousand miles of Atlantic. Its place in the sky told him he had time for only a few more casts before he had to meet Trapper.

The next cast was much better, forming a fairly symmetrical oval before dropping onto several dozen glittering creatures. A few escapees nevertheless managed to strand themselves on dry land, where they lay panting and flopping next to the very bucket they were trying to avoid. Their narrow bodies flashed like quicksilver in the sun. Cassidy licked the salt off his lower lip, pulling the net in, satisfied this time with his cast.

* * *

The Jupiter Marina was not much more than a shack on stilts. It sat on a rickety dock where the Loxahatchee River emptied into the intracoastal waterway. Everyone called it “the Jupiter Hilton,” which the locals deemed the height of sardonic wit.

The irony was lost on Cassidy. To him it was one of the epicenters of his life, the place where all the fishermen and divers sooner or later ended up on any given weekend. It was where you got fuel if you were rich enough to be gas-powered, where you got lunch if you were not too far out in the Gulf Stream, and where you went to deal in baitfish if you had some to buy or sell.

Cassidy, a seller this morning, rode up with the heavy bucket swinging on his handlebars, noticing as he dismounted two rough-looking men at the dock—one white, one black—pumping fuel into the battered red can on their grungy skiff. He had seen them around before, but they had never paid him any attention. This time the white one nudged the other and gestured toward Cassidy. He ignored them and leaned his bike next to the ice cooler. There was another man, nicely dressed in clean khaki shorts and a spotless white bass fishing shirt, sitting in the back of the skiff rather imperiously, reading the
Palm Beach Post.

Cassidy went around to the back of the building to use the hose, shivering from the cool water as he washed the salt away. By the time he got back to the front, the bucket was gone. He looked around and saw it sitting on the green bench between the two men at the front of the store. The black one was sitting next to it, the other standing with his knee cocked up on the bench, looking at Cassidy and smiling a not particularly friendly smile.

Taking a deep breath, Cassidy walked over to them and reached for the bucket. The white one pushed his baseball cap back on his sunburned forehead and placed the bucket on the ground, pushing it with his toe under the bench.

“Hey!” Cassidy said.

“Hey yourself,” said the white one.

“That's my—”

“Your bucket?” said the white one. “Dogged if it didn't look exactly like our bucket, didn't it, Bobby?”

The black man didn't answer. In fact, he didn't seem to even be listening. When he finally looked over, Cassidy saw something so completely dead behind his bloodshot eyes that a shiver ran down his spine. Cassidy looked over to the boat where the nicely dressed man continued to read his paper, paying them no attention.

The white man was talking again in his false-friendly way. “You're that little diver people talks about,” he said.

His smile wasn't reassuring. The man was fair-skinned but clearly spent so much time in the sun he seemed to be in a permanent state of sunburn. Anywhere on him that wasn't already peeling was red and getting ready to. He wore cutoff jeans, incredibly worn Docksiders, and a sleeveless Walker's Cay Marina staff T-shirt with
LUCKY
embroidered over the pocket.

“Got the little skiff with a old Evinrude Handitwin three on it?” the white man said.

Cassidy shrugged.

“Sometimes a little aluminum canoe? Have to use that trick where you use a little rope ladder to come in over the bow?”

Cassidy was surprised. He'd never noticed anyone watching him out there.