Tilt (13 page)

Six-thirty a.m. Stan ran into the gym in his street clothes and his old runners. The place was crawling with guys in shorts and jerseys, guys rubbing the sleep out of their eyes, guys who smelled already from nervous perspiration. Balls bounced everywhere, arced toward quiet hoops.

Most of the JV team from last year was there, and the ten returning seniors, and plenty of others. Just as Stan had thought, the gym was full of sweaty guys up too early, trying too hard, to fill just two spots.

Karl Brolin, Jamie Hartleman and the others had commandeered the south hoop. Like this was their private club. Brolin especially looked unconcerned, dragging his ass, slapping someone in mock defense.

Where was Coach Burgess? No time to hesitate. Stan ran straight onto the floor.

“Hey, Brolin!” The big guy didn't turn around. “One on one, right now! You and me. Game to five!”

Someone laughed. A mosquito was challenging an elephant. Brolin turned his head slightly.

“Come on! Five bucks! I get the ball first!”

Stan didn't have five bucks on him. He didn't even have his gym gear. It was all back at the house but if he'd gone home from Janine's he would have never made it to tryout. Somebody would have woken up. So he had walked and walked until the chilly dawn turned older.

“Do I know you?” Brolin asked.

“That's the fucking guy from the game,” Hartleman said. “Kid can shoot.”

Stan snagged a loose ball and set up just past the top of the key. “Game to five, five bucks. I don't have much time.”

His mother's alarm rang at seven. If Stan wasn't on the spot to explain Feldon and the disappearance of Ron, the house might go up in a mushroom cloud.

“Where's your fucking gear?” Brolin asked. But he was smiling. He threw away the ball he was holding, took a step toward Stan. The others stood back a few steps. Stan launched a shot from where he was standing.

Swish.

“That's one!” he said.

“I didn't say we'd started yet,” Brolin said. “Gotta check the ball first.”

But Hartleman fired it back to Stan. “That's one, Karl! I told you the kid could shoot.”

As soon as the ball touched Stan's hands he shot it again.

“Two!” he said, even before it went in.

“Kid can shoot! You got to play some D, fat ass!” Hartleman said.

Brolin walked the ball out to Stan and took a defensive stance close to him, hands ready. Angry breath. Stan motioned to shoot and Brolin rose above him like a sudden skyscraper . . . that Stan zipped around. A nervous layup. The ball circled the rim, circled . . . 

“Please go in,”
Stan muttered.

“Three! Kid's got three!”

Everyone was crowded round now. All the other balls stopped bouncing. It was like a playground fight. Brolin shoved the ball at Stan, then slapped it away, elbowed his way to the basket. Slam dunk.

“One,” he grunted.

At the top of the key again Brolin took his own long shot. What was he thinking? No spin, flat arc, clang off the rim. Stan grabbed the rebound, scooted to the corner past the three-point line, then launched another shot before Brolin got on him.

“Four! Kid's got fucking four!”

“What's going on here?” Coach Burgess said. He just materialized somehow. He wasn't a yelling kind of coach. He was worse, as far as Stan had heard — a man who never raised his voice. Never repeated himself.

“Who opened the equipment room?” he asked quietly.

Karl Brolin hung his head.

“You want to play for me, you work first. Understood?”

Someone dropped a basketball that bounced twice, like embarrassed thunder, before he could corral it again in clumsy hands. Marty Wilkens. What was he even doing here?

Burgess stared him into cold stone. Then slowly his eyes fixed on Stan.

“Where's your gear?”

Stan couldn't think of what to say.

“Anyone who wants to play for me respects this gym, respects the game.”

“Yes, sir,” Stan said. Then, “I have to leave anyway.”

“What?”

“My mom gets up at seven o'clock,” Stan said. As if that could explain anything.

“Kid can shoot, Coach,” Jamie Hartleman said, but in a pleading tone.

“Take your disrespect and get the hell out of here,” Burgess said to Stan. He turned his head slightly. “Brolin — a hundred pushups. Right now. I don't care if you die doing them. Everybody else — fifty sprints. Length of the gym. Call out your numbers.”

Nobody moved.

“Go!”

“Mom?” Just before seven Stan stood quiet as a burglar outside her door, his chest heaving. He'd run all the way home, his fifty sprints and more, fast as spit, with no one watching.

He'd just ensured that never in his lifetime would he make the senior varsity team.

“Mom. I'd like to come in.”

He'd picked up Mr. Strawberry on the front porch to give to Lily as soon as she woke up.

“Stan?”

Flushing from the ensuite bathroom. Then he heard the closet opening and closing. She was looking for her robe.

When she opened the bedroom door she stood, so tired she was practically vibrating in her red satin robe. Her hair looked like she'd been clutching it and letting go all night long.

“Dad took off. I convinced him to leave Feldon with us. Kelly-Ann is coming to get him . . . I'm . . .  sure.”

His mother looked like she was in a dream.

“Have you been out running or something? Why do you have Mr. Strawberry?” she asked.

He told her about the taxi, about saving Feldon.

“Feldon is here?” she said.

“He's in my room. Dad was leaving in the middle of the night. He wanted to take Feldon but I convinced him . . .” It was like the remote. No matter how patiently he went over it, she still couldn't seem to get it.

“When is Kelly-Ann coming?” she asked finally.

“When we call her, I guess.”

“You
guess?
” His mother looked around, lost. “And Feldon is sleeping in your bed?”

Stan took her into his bedroom to show her . . .  the unmade empty bed, Feldonless.

“He
was
here.” Stan knew he sounded ridiculous.

“You lost him?” Now his mother was waking up. Stan pulled back the rumpled covers as if the kid might have made himself so small he could be hiding there. Then Stan kneeled down and looked under the bed, remembering how Feldon had hidden in the kitchen cupboard just the day before.

No one. Feldon was not there.

“Your father left him in your care and you've lost him?”

“I gave him my bed and . . .” Stan didn't want to go into any further details. It was his business what he did after saving his half-brother from a wasted life with a cowardly dimwit of a father.

“And what? What did you do?”

He could say that he had slept on the pull-out. It was still rumpled — probably. Probably it would sound true and all he'd be then was a liar.

“Mr. Strawberry!” Lily blurted and launched herself at Stan. “You found him!”

Her pajamas were soaking. Stan could smell it almost before —

“Lily! Oh, God, Lily!”

Lily started to just scream in the middle of Stan's room with Mr. Strawberry wrapped around her neck.

“Stop screaming!”

Stan moved quickly to carry off the kicking girl. She screamed and screamed directly in his ear, and pounded her fists against his back, but he held on until she was simply sobbing against him.

“It's all right. It's all right, sweet knees,” he whispered to her.

He carried her downstairs. A sign on the toilet, in his mother's hand, read FLUSH AND I WILL KILL YOU. Stan filled the tub for Lily, who started shrieking again until she couldn't catch her breath anymore. Then Stan handed her a warm washcloth so that it became more or less all right.

Stan's mother burst into the bathroom holding a reeking wad of Lily's sheets. “Lily, where did Feldon go?”

“Feldon is gone?”

“It's all right!” Stan said quickly. “Dad's gone again. But I made sure he left Feldon. But we don't know if Dad came back in the night to get him?”

Why hadn't Stan paid more attention? It would be just like Ron to change his mind in the taxi and come back and steal Feldon away.

“Lily!”
Stan's mother said.

“Feldon would have told me if he was going anywhere.” Lily splashed quietly now, not looking at either of them.

“What I'm saying is that last night Dad was going to take Feldon away. They were both going to leave in a taxi . . .”

“But where?”

Someone knocked on the bathroom door. “I need to go pee-pee!” said a little voice.

Stan's mother ripped open the door. Feldon was standing in his clothes — the ones from last night — holding himself and doing a little dance.

“Oh, for God's sake!”
Stan's mother said.

“Feldon slept with
me
last night!” Lily said.

“I have to go!”
Feldon danced and held himself.

“Well, I don't want to see your nib thing!” Lily yelled back.

Stan took him to the upstairs bathroom.

“It stinks in here,” Feldon said, but Stan got him to plug his nose.

“I thought you were gone!” he said.

“Lily came and got me,” Feldon said, his pants around his ankles.

“Lily did?”

“She saved me from the taxi man.” When Feldon turned around to explain he almost sprayed Stan, who stepped deftly.

“Keep your eye on the bowl there, big shooter!” Stan felt like laughing. “It wasn't Lily, it was me, Feldon! I was the one who saved you last night.”

—

There was not much time now to explain it all again to Stan's mother, to get her to understand. Some things she grasped much better than Stan, but they tended to be old things. Mortgages. Finances in general. Love, probably — although Stan was beginning to see that even now she hardly understood anything about it, and that was a sobering thought. The woman who had married Ron did not have a firm grasp on the most important human endeavor.

Love.

Love was the most important human endeavor. Stan could see that now, too, even as he was explaining Feldon's presence and Ron's absence yet again to his mother, who was running around in her bedroom looking for a clean outfit to wear to what might be her last day of work.

It was Monday, the day of the all-staff meeting when something extraordinary was about to be announced — extraordinary but probably not good. Good would have been announced on Friday, so they would all have had the weekend to celebrate. So probably bankruptcy, funding pulled, or some other collapse.

“I have to go! I have to go!” she said, fiddling with her earrings. She was constitutionally incapable of stepping foot outside the house before she'd re-applied her lipstick. If it was going to be the end she'd look well put together at least.

Stan felt like he could look at women differently now. Not long ago he had stood on a ladder clutching the wall of a woman at a very odd hour before sunrise.

“Today of all days I have to go and simply can't look after Feldon!” she said.

“I'll stay with him,” Stan said.

“You have school!” She was changing her earrings now. She had a very female way of cocking her head while putting on earrings.

She was exchanging black for white — beads for pearls. She was a good mother. He felt calmer just watching her.

“You can't just skip class to babysit,” she said. “I'll call Kelly-Ann from work. She must be out of her mind with worry.”

“I don't have anything big today,” Stan said. “I've got all my textbooks at home anyway. I'll just work from here.” He felt calm. A windless lake at dawn. The man who was up 4-1 on Karl Brolin before Coach Burgess walked in.

“You had something on today,” she said. Shoes now — the black or the beige? Height or comfort?

“Nothing. It's all review.”

A narrow escape, now that he thought of it. Who would ever want to play for Coach Burgess?

She went for height. Black went with pearls. Then she changed her belt — a smaller silver buckle for her skirt. She hadn't had breakfast yet. How often did she leave home just like this, in a panic, without breakfast?

“You had something special today,” she pressed. “What are you forgetting? I know you told me!”

She stopped to look at him. Gary was stuck on her. That's why Gary was hanging around. He wasn't much to look at but he could spin a ball into a hoop backwards with people watching.

“It's a nothing day,” Stan said. “You call Kelly-Ann. I'll look after Feldon. So go. Go!”

“But . . .”

“I'll get some breakfast into the kids and Feldon and I will see Lily to the bus.”

“One wobble over this line,” Lily said, “and the goblins start to burn. Just like flies when you put them under a magnifying glass.”

They were at the bus stop. Lily was pointing with her toe at a squiggle in the dirt by the curb. “But all they want to do is get over that line!”

“Why?” Feldon asked.

It had turned into a brilliant, bright morning, the air cool, the world unusually fresh. None of the snowflakes from last night had lasted.

“Because that's what you do when you're a goblin. You try to get over the line!”

The bus pulled up and she climbed on board. She did not look back at Stan or Feldon.

“She wiggles in bed,” Feldon said on the walk home.

Stan picked up his ball at home and took Feldon to the back lot, where he showed his half-brother the basics of the set shot. The ball was too big for Feldon's hands but he could still bend his elbows and knees properly and line up his shoulders and use the whip-wave of his body to propel the ball high enough — and cock his wrists to spin it after follow-through. The spin was so important.

Stan chased down rebounds and demonstrated different shots. Feldon stayed with it for a while. Then he got distracted by some ants that were staging a battle on a perfect square of ancient patio stone that someone had abandoned near the fence. Red vs. black, millions of them having it out. Feldon squatted to be closer to the action. The battlefield remained precisely within the boundaries of the patio stone. No ants stepped beyond, although they could have — of course they could have.

It looked like the black ants were slightly bigger than the red and were carrying off their opponents' bodies in surging columns. Eggs were being carried off, too. There beyond the patio stone, in a long line that Feldon followed. Stan sat on his basketball and listened to his explanation.

“Goblins are waiting for them in the cracks. That's why they stay on the square. Except the egg line. Goblins hate eggs.” He said it like a future neurosurgeon.

People were going to listen to Feldon, Stan thought. People might never believe Lily, but Feldon they would listen to.

And Kelly-Ann was coming any moment now to take Feldon away. The thought came to Stan suddenly, like sitting on a bruise he'd forgotten.

“Your mother is coming to get you,” Stan said on the walk home.

“When?” Feldon asked.

“Soon, I think.” The basketball fit like the whole world under Feldon's arm. “But we're going to stay in touch.”

“Will you come visit?”

“Yup. We'll just figure out when.”

“And we could go fishing?”

Had Feldon really enjoyed fishing?

“Anything you want. We're half-brothers. We can do it.”

Stan was going to get his driver's license soon. He could go visit whoever he wanted.

He wasn't a kid anymore.

—

At lunch they were dipping soldier fingers of toast into soft-boiled eggs when the phone rang. Feldon had yellow egg yolk dripping from the corner of his mouth, which Stan was about to wipe. Instead he walked to the phone. Probably it was Kelly-Ann, insane with worry about her son.

“Hello,” he said calmly, and tossed Feldon the kitchen rag.

“What are you doing home?” Kelly-Ann said in a very familiar way, as if . . . as if she was actually Janine, not Kelly-Ann.

Stan's heart bounced like a basketball.

“I'm looking after Feldon.”

“Jason Biggs said you ran out of tryout,” she said. “And you missed biology. Stillwater said anyone absent was going to get zero.”

The test! Stan had completely forgotten.

“Did Biggs say I didn't miss a shot?”

Feldon munched, munched his toast soldiers. The sun was slanting and even through dirty windows half of Feldon's face was in shadows, half in bright light.

“What happened?”

So Stan told her all about it, and the rest as well —
his mother, the dramatic day at work. It was like he was back on the ladder again. The world didn't matter. It was just . . . great to have her to talk to.

“Are you worried about your mom?” Janine asked. “What if she loses her job?”

Stan wasn't worried . . . because of the way the sun hit the egg yolk that was still on Feldon's face. It was hard to explain beyond that.

“Whatever happens is just going to happen,” he said. “It's just a problem.”

“Of course it's a problem! If your mother loses her income, and your father won't help any . . .”

“No, I mean, it's
just
a problem,” he said. What did he mean by that? The words slipped out. He would have to think it through later.

He had the sense that a lot of what had happened recently he'd have to think about at another time.

Feldon was nearly finished his soldiers. Stan checked the milk in the fridge. It smelled all right. His mother needed to do a proper shop for the whole week, not just grabbing stuff as she did from time to time on her way home. How much was in her bank account? He had no idea. But they were still going to eat. Weren't they?

“Some things there's no solution for,” Janine said.

He pictured her standing outside the school doors, the phone pressed against her left ear. He thought about leaning in and kissing the base of her neck. Just where the lizard sat.

How warm it would be.

“If you're home alone looking after Feldon then maybe I should come over.” She said it just like that.
Maybe I should come over
.

Maybe this was where she was supposed to be.

Stan felt calm and yet his pulse steamed, as if he was driving for the hoop just a half step ahead of Karl Brolin.

“Come on over,” he said to Janine.

—

Come on over.

“A friend of mine is coming over,” he said nonchalantly to Feldon as he stood over the sink and scraped at the egg on the plate and the cutlery.

Maybe she could come over and Feldon might fall asleep and one thing might lead to another. Maybe he'd have a chance to lean toward the heat of her body — he could feel the heat of her, just thinking about it — and maybe he could . . . 

Feldon was folding a business reply card from a magazine that had been on the counter. Tiny, precise movements.

Future neurosurgeon.

Confident fingers. The card was turning into something intricate.

“Where'd you learn to do that?” Stan asked.

“My mom showed me.”

“Really? She's pretty smart, I bet.”

Tiny, tiny folds. Feldon kept his eyes just inches away. Like a scientist looking through a microscope.

A bunny, maybe, with pointy ears? Feldon compressed it with his finger and it hopped.

“Amazing!”

Feldon set the paper bunny on the counter angled toward the door, as if it might scamper off any moment. He found a coupon in a pile of papers and began to fold that.

“You must miss her?” Stan said to Feldon.

“Who?” the boy asked.

“Your mother!”

Fold after fold.

“She can do butterflies,” Feldon said solemnly. “And Uncle Liam can do dragons!”

“Who's Uncle Liam?”

“He comes to help Mommy sleep. But he has to leave really early. Sometimes he makes bacon.”

“He helps her sleep?” Stan said.

“When Daddy isn't home.”

The doorbell then. Stan felt a surge — Janine! —
but summoned all his powers to ignore it.

“What do you mean? How often does your dad go away?”
Your dad
.

“Only sometimes,” Feldon said. “This time he brought me, too. Maybe Mommy won't be home.”

The bell again. Stan saw Janine through the blurry front door window.

Janine Igwash in his house.

“Why won't your mom be home?”

Feldon started folding something else from the pile of papers. “Because she went to Me-too Bay.”

“Where?”

Stan got up to let Janine in. There was an awkward moment at the door when really all he wanted to do was kiss her deeper and deeper for about half an hour until they both melted from the heat of it. Instead he stood too far back with his hands in his pockets, shuffling his feet.

“Hey,” she said.

She was crackingly beautiful.

Somehow Stan remembered himself.

“Me-too Bay?” he said to Feldon. “What?”

“That's where she went,” Feldon said.

—

Montego Bay. That's what Feldon was trying to say. It took a while for Stan and Janine to get the information out of him. First he had to tell them all about the new bathing suits that kept arriving in the mail and how his mother would stand in front of the mirror and turn this way and that but she couldn't decide on pink or black. And every suit made her look fat, she said. And Uncle Liam would tell her she wasn't fat and she would say she was and he would bring home pie for everyone.

Janine helped Feldon arrange the folded creations, some of which looked like animals and some were just shapes. Janine sat with her legs crossed and her body inches away from Stan.

“Is Uncle Liam her brother or — ?” Stan pressed.

“He's her sleeping friend,” Feldon said.

All the folded creations were facing in the same direction, like cows in a field.

“He snorts pretty loud,” Feldon said.

Janine's collar cut across the little lizard. It was an effort to keep himself from reaching out to touch it.

“And he makes funny noises in the bathroom.”

Stan laughed too loud. The air in the room was nearly boiling just because Janine was sitting there.

“And now your mother and Uncle Liam have gone to Montego Bay?” Stan pressed.

“Sometimes we went to the go-carts,” Feldon said.

“He let you drive a go-cart?”

“Brmmm! Brmmm!”
Feldon said. He turned his hands as if he was steering.

“But what was your dad doing while all this happened?”

“Brmmm! Brmmm!”

Feldon was as bad as Lily. Stan put his hand on Janine's shoulder, and she melted into the movement.

“Where's your dad's bedroom?” Stan said finally to Feldon, who squinted as if this was the most ridiculous question. “I mean, do your mom and dad . . . Do they sleep together, or does he have his own place?”

Feldon squealed, it was so funny. “Daddy doesn't sleep! He works!”

—

How some people arranged their lives — good luck trying to figure it all out, Stan thought.

But maybe . . . maybe his father had good reasons to leave after all. It was hard to grasp what the situation might be. Stan wasn't in his father's shoes.

But he wouldn't have abandoned his son, that was for sure.

Stan and Janine took Feldon to the park and played on the swings with other preschoolers. Janine asked Feldon if he went to kindergarten and he acted as if he'd never heard of it. He dug in the sand with his fingers and moved twigs and rocks into position so that the hole was surrounded by a barricade. So the ants wouldn't get in.

Two or three mothers eyeballed Stan and Janine for looking too young to have a kid themselves, Stan guessed. But it was no one's business. Janine lifted Feldon and hugged him for a moment before putting him on the high swing. She would make a terrific mother, Stan thought.

Feldon ran up and down the tall slide and Stan wondered what they were going to do with him if Kelly-Ann didn't show up. What if she stayed in Montego Bay — in Jamaica! — with Uncle Liam, drinking fancy drinks and lying on the beach? What if Stan's mother really did lose her job? What if something burst inside her from the pressure and she had to go to the hospital to die, leaving Stan in charge?

What would he do?

Stan watched Feldon run down the slippery steel. What kind of kid refused to slide? Janine was beside him, letting him do it. He was going to fall and break his front teeth and the other mothers would just cross their arms and say, “What are you doing having a kid at your age anyway?”

“Hey, Feldon, let's go home, buddy!” Stan said suddenly. He clapped his hands like he was somebody's coach. “Hey, Feldon. Stop running!”

“It's okay,” Janine said.

Feldon was going to break his head on the steel post.

“Stop it!” Stan yelled.

The boy twisted, lost his balance. Stan lunged, caught Feldon by the arm, braced him with his body . . . and barked his own shin on the edge of the slide.

Stan said nothing, just held his half-brother and carried him down to the ground.

“Are you all right, buddy?”

Feldon squirmed, trying to get back on the slide.

“Let's head home, okay?”

“He was all right till you tried to grab him!” Janine said.

A whole crowd of mothers was looking at them now — teenagers with a child.

Stan didn't trust himself to speak till the wave of anger had passed.

Janine was looking so beautiful, it hurt not to touch her.

It was just a wave.

But he could see how a man could lose control and screw it up because of a wave.

Everything was tilted. The whole way home he felt like he had no idea what the next step might bring.