Shame (3 page)

“Twenty years ago I played on the team that won that state championship.” I pointed to the faded banner hanging proudly on the wall of the gym next to the scoreboard. “I can't promise you the same kind of success. All I can promise is that we're going to work hard, we're going to get in shape, and we're going to have fun. We'll win as many games as we're supposed to if we do all of these things.”

Then I started them on drills—dribbling to the foul line and back, to midcourt and back, to the other foul line and back, to the far inbounds line and back. I had them do touch-pass drills, bounce-pass drills, baseball passes. I had them dribble to the far end of the court and back, alternating dribbles between their legs.

“Between your legs, Frank,” I called to one of the new boys. “Not off your legs.” B. W. and the seniors could do this without thinking, but some of the new boys always had trouble. “It's not a hot dog move,” I shouted out as they struggled slowly upcourt, sometimes bouncing the ball off their feet and chasing it off the court, sometimes bouncing it off more sensitive parts of their anatomy and doubling over. “It's a way to keep part of your body between the ball and the man guarding you.” In a week or so I'd change the drill so that they guarded each other on the way upcourt, all to demonstrate what it was good for; while it wasn't always an appropriate move, they could do it when they needed to if they'd done it repeatedly, and that was the idea behind all of these drills—repeating actions until they became second nature, until the body had memorized them like the brain memorizes a face or a line from a song.

We worked on some very basic plays: screen and roll, backdoor passes, dribble penetration, and passing out to the perimeter. Kids these days don't think much about passing thanks to watching the NBA, people playing one-on-one even when it's five-on-five.

After we'd done drills, I let them scrimmage full court, four-on- four, winners keep the court, until all of them had had a chance to play at least once. They played hard, with exuberance if not always great skill, and there were some nice moments: Tyrel faking his brother off his feet and Martel returning the favor on his end of the floor, Micheal Wilkes driving the baseline, Bird Burke dropping in the fadeaway jumper from twenty, B. W. directing traffic. They were pretty much done in by the time everybody had played, drenched with sweat and bent over, clutching their shorts and puffing for air, the sure signs a player has given it everything he has.

They were almost finished.

“Okay,” I said, checking my watch for effect. “Twenty laps around the court. Winner doesn't run after practice tomorrow. Go!” And off they went, shoes squeaking, jostling for position, an initial pack like the starting line of a marathon. Micheal Wilkes or one of the Sparks kids would probably win; they were the best natural athletes on the court. But sometimes B. W. or one of the others, someone with less pure physical ability but more want-to, would get caught up in the contest and surprise everyone. That, too, was part of whatever strategy I had.

While they ran, I shot baskets, starting off with one at the free throw line, a daily ritual, and then around the perimeter at about twenty feet.

“You ready?” came the voice from behind me. Carla Briggs—tall, her long brown hair in a ponytail—stepped around the hard-puffing Ramiro Garza, already mired toward the back of the pack, and joined me on the court. Carla was three years out of college, our high school girls' basketball coach; she also taught history. I liked her, although I knew she was too bright and too intense for us to keep for long. She brooded over each loss as though it were a battle fought over actual territory, as though actual human lives were lost. Because of her, the girls played miles above their potential, and they won more games than anyone had a right to expect given the middling pool of talent we drew from, which meant that someday soon Carla would move on to some 5A basketball powerhouse or maybe a college assistant job and I'd be left to break in a new one-on-one partner.

Until then, I had a partner in crime. She would often come by after her sixth-hour class and shoot with me once my practice ended. Usually we'd end up playing one-on-one as the boys finished their laps and either collapsed into the bleachers to watch or trudged back to the showers. We also sat together on those occasions when both teams went on a road trip, but at such times, even though it was harder for us to talk, I draped myself across the seat behind her instead of sitting next to her in the narrow confines of the bus. You see, despite the fact that Michelle sometimes dropped by after school herself to shoot with us or to chat with Carla, I had to be careful not to spend too much time alone or in conspicuously intimate circumstances with Carla. Rumors started easily in a small town. Even though my civic spirit in coaching the team had been noted and applauded and I had been largely forgiven for my one youthful indiscretion, the past always seems to be sitting within easy reach of anybody who wants to pick it up.

“How do your kids look this year?” she asked, launching an effortless arc from the top of the key.

“God only knows,” I said. I rebounded her made shot and bounced the ball back out to her. “Yours?”

“Better and better,” she said, shooting again with the nonchalant flip of the wrist that I ached to pass on to my kids. “We could win a few games this year.”

“I don't doubt that,” I said, passing it out to her again. “You warm?”

For answer she drove the baseline, gave me a head juke to get me in the air, and stepped around me to lay it off the backboard.

“Ah,” I said, passing it to her to check. “New move.”

“Had to do something,” she said, giving ground slowly as I dribbled back into her. “You waxed my butt the last couple of times we played. I couldn't stand for that.” And, of course, she couldn't. That was one of the reasons I liked her.

Michelle called my name when we were tied at ten and distracted me enough that I practically gave Carla a seventeen-footer.

“I'm going home to fix dinner,” Michelle called from the sideline; she was wearing boots and knew I wouldn't allow her on the court proper.

“I'll be along in a second,” I called back, dribbling as Carla watched warily. “Just as soon as I—” and in mid-sentence I cut to my left, then stopped to pop a jumper “—finish this game.”

“Sneaky,” Carla said.

“Learned it from you.” I waved as Michelle exited.

I won seventeen-fifteen, and dinner was ready and on the table when I got to the house, thick juicy fried hamburgers for everyone but Lauren, who had a bowl full of green stuff in front of her and a paranoid look on her face as she looked around at her dining partners.

“What's up?” I asked.

“I am now a vegetarian,” Lauren said. “I will no longer be a party to the beef conspiracy.”

“The what?” I looked across at Michelle, who shrugged. Not her idea, this.

“The beef conspiracy,” B. W. said, already three bites into his second burger.

Lauren speared a slice of cucumber. “I've decided to quit FFA,” she said, crunching happily. “Or at least stop showing cattle. I refuse to be party to their exploitation.”

“Okay, now you're just quoting somebody,” B. W. said.

Lauren stuck out a green-flecked tongue at him.

Future Farmers of America, blue jackets, and livestock contests had been a part of Lauren's life since she was conceived. Before, even. I stood staring at her. Something must have kidnapped my sweet, beef-eating daughter and replaced her with this Stepford Vegetarian.

“Beef is high in cholesterol,” Lauren explained to me, crunching. “And Mrs. Anderson said cows overgraze the land and release millions of tons of ozone into the atmosphere, or something like that.”

B. W. shook his head. “It's methane, or something like that.”

“Whatever.” She arched her eyebrows dramatically. “Anyway, now you know. What are we going to do about it?”

I sat down and picked up my first greasy burger, a slab of thick melting Watonga cheddar on top, spread top and bottom with Selmon Brothers barbecue sauce, just the way I liked it. “Lauren, we raise cattle. Our family has always raised cattle. That's what we do.” I took a bite, and dear Lord, it was good. “Anyway, people love hamburger. They love a good steak.”

“Why don't we at least raise emus?”

“Emu?” I blinked a couple of times like the poleaxed steer I was, looked at Michelle as though to say,
she's your daughter
,
and tried to turn my attention back to my food. It almost worked; I was almost able to block out the ode to emus that followed.

It was pretty sad; not yet forty years old and I was already hopelessly behind the times. Either that or I was being treacherously undermined by some kind of secular humanist seventh-grade science teacher. Why didn't Mrs. Anderson spend more time teaching them that life in a one-horse town could be hazardous to their long-term development instead of turning my daughter into an advocate for flightless birds?

Of course, that night when she couldn't go to sleep, whom did she call? Her cow-murdering father.

“Tell me a story,” she said, as she still sometimes did when I looked in on her and found her still awake, and I went into her darkened room, the vague outlines of teen love gods whose names I didn't know peering from posters on the wall.

“Doesn't it ever get spooky to have all those guys watch you undress?” I asked. “The correct answer, by the way, is yes. It will always be spooky to have a guy watch you undress.”

“Oh, Daddy,” she said as I sat on the edge of the bed and she wriggled away so as not to be pinned down by the comforter. “Try not to be so strange.”

“What kind of story do you want?” I asked, knowing that it didn't really matter, that all she really wanted was the sound of my voice. The next morning she never seemed to remember the stories I told.

“You pick,” she said, and yawned.

So I told her a story I'd recently heard Robert Bly tell a gathering of men on a PBS special on television. It was supposed to symbolize something about manhood, I guess, since that was what the special was about, although I had just watched it because Michelle wanted to listen to Bly, one of her favorite poets. Anyway, it was the only story I could remember just at that moment.

“Once upon a time there was a king and a queen. They lived in a castle, and near the castle was a vast and dangerous forest.” As she settled farther down into her pillow, I told her that the king had sent a small group of hunters, then ever-larger groups of hunters into the forest, and none of them had ever returned, and soon nobody went near that forest. Her eyes closed, and she began to breathe regularly. “When a young man came along looking for adventure, the king told him that if he was looking for adventure he could point him in the right direction, and so off he went into those woods alone, except for his dog.” By then I could hear her snoring, but sometimes if I stopped she would jerk back upright and demand to know what was wrong, she was listening, so I kept going.

“The young man walked deep into the forest and it became darker and darker, and ominous shapes moved all around him as he walked through a murky bog. Then all of a sudden, a monstrous hand reached up from the water and yanked his dog under.”

Her breathing was deep and regular. I thought about stopping—but I was close to the end, and I didn't want her to sit up and say, “What happened?”

I patted her reassuringly. “Now, the young man didn't panic. He just stood there for a moment, reflecting, and said, finally, ‘Well, this must be the place.'”

I sat there watching her chest rise and fall. I counted to three hundred—five minutes, or thereabouts. I placed my hand gently on her forehead, prayed for her safety and for wisdom. Then I got up and slipped out of the room, pulling the door shut behind me.

Michelle and I had adjourned to the living room after dinner, and while I had been telling Bly's story, she had put on the Eagles'
Hotel California
and was listening to “Wasted Time.”

“Everything okay?”

“Lauren wanted a story,” I said, as I leaned over her shoulder and nuzzled her cheek.

She turned her head to kiss me fully on the lips. “What story did you tell her?”

I went around and sat across from her. “I told her the plot of that Mickey Rourke movie we saw that one time. You know, the one set in Brazil, with all the naked women?”

She rolled her eyes and went back to her grading. I got out my pen and paper and started writing letters.

I wrote my parents, happily living out their golden years in Arizona.

I wrote my baby sister Candace at the University of New Mexico, lovely Candace, who came along as a menopause baby (although of course my mother would never use that word, referring as it did to a bodily function) after Michelle, Michael, and I moved into this farmhouse and my mom and dad were forced back into the same bedroom for the first time in my awareness.

My folks were inclined to regard Candace as some kind of miraculous replacement for my big brother, Trent, who graduated from Watonga in 1967, joined the Marines to fight communists, and was killed during the Tet Offensive at the siege of Khe Sanh. Most of the time I was inclined to agree with them, although, of course, even the most wonderful children can't replace those you lost, something those who think that the book of Job has a happy ending just don't understand.

I even wrote one of my rare letters to Samantha and Bill in Rockwall, Texas, a letter addressed to both of them although I didn't like Bill and imagine he returned the feeling. Still, it let us preserve the illusion of lifelong friendship.

Everyone tells me that letter writing is a lost art, and all I can say about that is, if it's true, it's a shame, a crying shame, as Oz would say. I never liked the telephone and would rather have had a few heartfelt lines penned as the mailman approaches than an hour of telephone talk, the voice in my ear a parody of intimacy.