Travel Team (3 page)

Danny finally said, “You haven't told me yet what you're doing here.”

Richie Walker grinned at his son, and did what he'd do sometimes, put a little street in his voice.

“Doing the same thing I have my whole life, dog,” he said. “You know, chillin' and lookin' for a game.”

He took the ball out of his lap and handed it to Danny. “Shoot for it.”

“Winners out.”

“You feeling any better?”

Danny had already decided something: He wasn't going to cry about this ever again. Not in front of his parents, not in front of him
self.

No more crying in basketball.

“I'll feel better when I beat the great Richie Walker in a game of one-on-one.”

He dribbled to the foul line, getting fancy, crossing over with his right hand to his left, wanting to come right back with the ball and go straight into his shot.

“Don't take this the wrong way, junior,” his dad said. “But that move needs work.”

Danny said to his dad, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, you want to talk or you want to play?”

S
OMETIMES
D
ANNY WOULD
G
OOGLE UP HIS DAD
'
S NAME WHEN HE WAS ON
-line, Google being the Internet version of going through the scrapbooks that his mom still kept down in the basement.

Even if you practically needed a treasure map to find the scrapbooks.

He did it now with the two of them downstairs in the kitchen, drinking the coffee his mom had made, telling him they were going to catch up a little, his dad saying he'd come upstairs to say good night before he left.

Good
night
, Danny noticed.

Not good-bye.

His parents were acting friendly with each other when they left the room, smiling at him, at each other, as if nobody in the room had a care in the world. Danny loved it when adults tried to put a smiley face on something, thinking they were putting something over on you.

It made Danny want to yell “Busted!” sometimes.

Oh, sure. There was a definite kind of smile you'd get from your parents, your teachers, your coaches. Danny thought it should come with some kind of warning siren. Most of the time it meant they were pissed, but still getting to it. Pissed at you, about something you did, or something you said.

Or in this case, pissed at each other.

He couldn't remember a time when his mom wasn't mad at his dad for leaving them.

It was more complicated with his dad, who had been mad at everything and everybody for as long as Danny could remember.

Now they were downstairs, catching up on all that, probably trying to see who could say the meanest things without either one of them ever raising their voice. His mom, he knew, would do most of the talking, wanting to know what he was doing in town and how come he hadn't been sending enough money from Las Vegas, where he'd been working for the Amazing Grace casino the past few years, how long he was going to be in Middletown before he left and—her version of things—broke his son's heart all over again.

Only it didn't break his heart, that was the thing he could never get her to understand.

There were plenty of things that bothered him, sure. His father hardly ever called, start there. Never wrote. Are you joking? And wouldn't learn how to use a computer, which meant e-mail was out of the question. Maybe that was why tonight felt like the longest conversation they'd had in a long time. Or maybe the longest they'd ever had.

You want to know what came closest to breaking his heart? That Danny had to look up all the things about Richie Walker's basketball career, from Middletown on, that Richie Walker could have told him himself.

Basically, though, Danny had just decided his dad was who he was. Like some sort of broken and put-back-together version of who he used to be. He was who he was and their relationship was what it was, and Danny couldn't see that changing anytime soon. And maybe not ever. He'd never describe it to his mom this way, but he'd worked it out for himself. It went all the way back to something she'd told him once about heart, and how you could divide it up any way you wanted to.

So, cool, he'd set aside this place in his heart for his dad, and what his dad could give him. Wanting more but not expecting more, happy when his dad would show up, even unexpected, the way he did tonight, sad when he left.

You got used to stuff, that's the way he looked at it.

Even divorce.

He would never say this to his mom, but he always thought he'd gotten used to divorce a lot better than Ali Walker ever had. Or ever would.

He just didn't go out of his way trying to put a fake smiley face on it the way they did, at least when he was still in the room.

So now he was in front of the Compaq his mom had gotten him from CompUSA for Christmas, Googling away. He had typed in “Richie Walker,” knowing the first page of what the search engine would spit back at him, the list of Web sites, knowing that the one he wanted was at the top of the second page.

ChildSportsStars.Com.

He clicked on
W
, knowing his dad's was there at the top of the list, Tiger Woods's down a bit lower. And Kerry Wood, the Cubs pitcher, even though Danny didn't exactly think you were a child because you made the big leagues when you were nineteen or twenty.

Then he clicked on his dad.

“The biggest little kid from the biggest little town in the world,” the headline read.

And proceeded to tell you all about Richie Walker, the dazzling point guard from the tiny town in Eastern Long Island who took his twelve-year-old travel team all the way to the finals of the nationals—what was now known as the Little League Basketball World Series—and about the Middletown Vikings' last upset victory in their amazing upset run to the title over a heavily favored team from Los Angeles.

On national television.

Danny felt as if all of it had been tattooed to his memory, the way you wished you could tattoo homework to your memory sometimes.

He knew almost all of it by heart, including the stuff in the little box on the side that told you about how ESPN was just starting out in those days and was putting just about anything on the air; how they decided to give the full treatment to the twelve-year-old nationals once they realized what kind of story they had with Richie Walker and his team.

The bio in ChildSportsStars.Com said:

“…and so Richie Walker and his teammates became a Disney movie even before Disney owned ESPN, the travel-team version of
The Bad News Bears.
There would even be the suggestion later that it was the story of the Middletown Vikings that had at least partially inspired the
Mighty Ducks
movies that would come later, the one about a ragtag hockey team from nowhere always finding a way….

“But every movie like this needs the right star. The right kid. And Middletown had one in Richie Walker, the sandy-haired point guard with what the commentators and sportswriters of the day described as all the Harlem Globetrotters in his suburban game….”

By the time Middletown had pulled off its first huge upset, over a heavily favored team from Toledo, Ohio, ESPN had fallen in love with Richie Walker and the Vikings. By the second week of the tournament, the whole thing had picked up enough momentum in the middle of February, the dead time in sports between the Super Bowl and the start of the NCAA basketball tournament, that ABC came in and made a deal to put the finals on
Wide World of Sports
, just because ESPN wasn't getting into enough households in those days, cable television not being nearly the force it is now.

Or so it said on ChildSportsStars.Com, and anywhere else they gave you a detailed account of the life and times of Richie Walker.

Middletown's own.

He had heard so many people say it that way, his whole life, that he sometimes felt as if the last part, Middletown's own, was part of his dad's name.

The son an expert on the town's favorite son.

Before it was all over, there would be a small picture of his dad's face on the cover of
Sports Illustrated,
not the main part of the cover, but up in a corner. His dad would end up on
The Today Show
, too
.

Even people who didn't watch the Middletown–L.A. final on a Saturday afternoon had managed to see the highlights of the last minute of the one-point game.

Most of which involved Middletown's little point guard, Richie Walker, dribbling out the clock all by himself.

Going between his legs a couple of times.

Crossing over in the last ten seconds and even pushing the ball through one of the defender's legs when it looked as if L.A. had finally trapped him in a double-team, while their coach kept waving his arms in the background and telling them to foul him.

Problem was, they couldn't foul what they couldn't catch.

You could watch the last minute by clicking on the video at ChildSportsStars.Com.

Danny had watched it what felt like a thousand times. Watched his dad and felt like he was watching himself, that's how much alike they looked (and how many times had people in town told him
that,
like it was breaking news?). Watched him with that old blue-and-white jersey hanging out of his shorts, dribbling. Finally being carried around the court at Market Square Arena in Indianapolis when it was all over and Middletown had won, 40–39.

They had that picture on the Web site, too.

The rest of it told how Richie Walker went on to become a high school all-America at Middletown High. A second-team all-America at Syracuse University and one of the first real stars who helped make the Big East a major draw on ESPN. First-round draft choice of the Golden State Warriors.

Finally a member of the NBA's All-Rookie Team, even though his rookie season was cut short by the famous car accident on the San Francisco side of the Bay Bridge after a Warriors-Spurs game.

Pictures of that, too: What was left of the Jeep Cherokee Richie Walker had bought before the season with some of his bonus money, the one they had to use the Jaws of Life to get him out of that night.

Danny knew the pictures the way he knew everything else about his dad's basketball career….

“Hey sport,” Richie Walker said now from behind Danny. “What you looking at there?”

Danny executed the essential kid laptop move, clicking off and folding down the screen, as slick as anything he could do on the court.

He gave his standard answer, no matter which parent was the one who'd suddenly appeared in the doorway.

“Nothing,” he said.

He and his mom were in the kitchen having breakfast, both of them already dressed for school, him for the seventh grade at St. Patrick's, his mom for her eighth-grade teaching schedule there. He went there because she taught there. They could afford Danny going there because she taught there, and his tuition was free.

His mom used to joke that it was usually private-school people that were supposed to be snobs, but that somehow they'd tipped that on its head in Middletown, and it was the parochial school kids, the ones who
didn't
go to Springs, that were supposed to be from the wrong side of the tracks.

“Even though we don't really have any tracks,” she'd say.

He had
SportsCenter
on the small counter television set, sound muted. It was part of their morning deal, just understood. Sound on until she came into the room, then sound off.

If there was some important news story going on, they watched
Today
.

Danny said, “Did he tell you why he's here?”

“He says he's not sure, exactly.”

Ali Walker stuffed one last folder into an already-stuffed leather shoulder bag, one that looked older to Danny than she did.

She turned and looked at him, hand on hip.

Giving him her smiley-face, even with his dad nowhere to be found.

“Sometimes he can't figure out why he's here until he's not here anymore,” she said. “Part of your father's charm.”

“I didn't mean to make you mad.”

“Look at me,” she said. “Do I look mad?”

Danny knew enough to know there was nothing for him with an honest answer to that. “No,” he said.

“I'm not mad,” Ali said, “I'm just making an observation.”

“Right.”

Aw, man, he thought. Where did that come from?

Rookie mistake, Walker.

“What does that mean?” she said. “
Right?”

Danny took a deep breath, let it out nice and slow, trying to be careful now. Trying to make his way across a patch of ice. “It just seems to me, sometimes, no big deal, that he seems to make you as mad when he is around as when he's not around. Is all.”

She started to say something right back, stopped herself with a wave of her hand.

“You're pretty smart for a guy who's really only interested in perfecting the double dribble.”

“
Crossover
dribble.”

“What
ever,”
she said, as if impersonating one of the girls in his class.

“Hey,” he said, “that's a code violation.”

Another one of their deals. There were strict rules of conversation at 422 Earl Avenue. No cursing of any kind, not even in the privacy of his own driveway. No “
duh.”
And, under penalty of loss of video privileges for the night, no “what
ever.”

Ever.

Ali Walker taught English. And was constantly telling her son that in at least one classroom—hers—and one home—theirs—the English language was not going to sound as if they were communicating by instant-message.

“I was just making a joke,” she said. “Trying to sound like one of the dear, ditzhead girls in one of my classes.”