Travel Team (5 page)

E
VEN WHEN THE WEEK SHOULD HAVE BEEN OVER
,
AT THE END OF SCHOOL ON
Friday, it wasn't over.

Because the Middletown Vikings were going to have their first practice, at five-thirty sharp, in the gym at St. Pat's.

Danny's mom had told him at lunch. The new basketball floor they'd put down in the Springs gym had suddenly turned lumpier than a bowl of Quaker oatmeal, and they were talking about tearing it up and starting all over again. And the high school gym was booked and there was an art fair at the Y.

And St. Pat's was always looking for any new ways to raise money and now they had this exciting moneymaking opportunity from the Middletown Basketball Travel Team.

Starting today.

“Figured you ought to hear it from me, sport,” she said.

“They're coming to
my
school?” he said. “
My
gym? What's the next thing I'm going to find out, they expect me to ball boy for them?”

“Why don't you go with Will after school today instead of playing ball?” she said. “Or take the bus and I'll meet you at home?”

His mom usually had teacher conferences after school on Friday, and Danny would get the gym to himself.

He shook his head no, closing his eyes good and tight.

No crying in basketball.

“I'm staying until they come,” he said.

“But I'm going to be late today.”

Danny said, “I'm staying.”

Will tried to get Danny to take the town bus with him after school. Or take the bus he took to the Flats, on the north side of town where he lived, a few blocks from Danny, and play his new
NCAA Football 2005
video game.

“My dad
played
college football,” Will said. “He says
NCAA 2005
is better.”

Will Stoddard basically said Danny should do anything except be anywhere near the St. Pat's gym when the “Springers”—it's what he called Springs School kids, in honor of
The Jerry Springer Show
—showed up for their first practice.

But Danny kept shaking his head every time Will came at him with a new alternative plan, even after they'd started playing one-on-one in the gym, and all the St. Pat's buses, including Tess's, were long gone.

Occasionally Will would whip out his cell phone, which he kept in his baggy white North Carolina shorts even when playing basketball. There was a part of Will, Danny knew, that believed that cell phones could even make sick people better.

“I'll call my brother,” he said. “He got his license yesterday. He's
looking
for reasons to ride around. He
wants
to come get us, and he usually doesn't want anything to do with either one of us.”

Danny shook his head from side to side, more slowly than before, trying to get through to him. “This is my day to have the gym to myself,” he said. “I'm not going to go hide in my locker.”

They had finished their first game of one-on-one, Danny winning, 10–7. The game was only that close because Danny had given Will his usual spot of five baskets. Sometimes he'd given him seven baskets in a game of ten and still beat him.

Will always took the points and always acted as if he was the one doing Danny the favor.

But then Danny would watch with great admiration sometimes as Will would borrow money off one of their other classmates and make the other kid feel as if this was his lucky day, that handing over five bucks to Will Stoddard was somehow exactly the same as the other kid winning the lottery.

Danny had just scored the winning basket by pushing the ball between Will's legs, flashing around him to collect it, and banking a combination hook-layup high off the backboard.

“Where'd you get that one?” Will said.

“My dad showed me.”

“I've been meaning to ask you all day—is he still in town?”

They had finished playing now, were sitting on the stage, still sweaty, legs dangling over the side. Danny bounced the ball on St. Pat's floor. “Unless he left while I was in school today.”

“You haven't seen him since…?”

“No,” Danny said. “But no biggie. You know how my dad is.” He turned to look at Will and shrugged. “Sometimes he's as hard to cover as ever.”

“Yeah,” Will said. “I know what you mean.”

Danny thinking: But how could you know, really? Danny knew how most people in Middletown were still obsessed with Richie Walker's comings and goings, how the Town Biddies still loved to gossip up a storm about the biggest star to ever come out of here, the kid who put Middletown on the map because of travel basketball, the kid who finally made it to the NBA, then left his wife and child not too long after the car accident that ended his career.

They didn't really know anything about his dad, any more than people who'd only ever seen him play on television or read about him in the newspapers knew about his dad.

Of course Danny felt the exact same way sometimes, not that he was going to put an ad in the
Middletown Dispatch
about that.

Danny said, “You don't have to stay until they come.”

Will, whose hair looked even more like steel wool when he'd start to sweat, the Bob Marley T-shirt his parents had brought him back from Jamaica looking as wet as if he'd just gone swimming in it off Main Beach, said, “Correction:
You
don't have to stay.”

“They're going to be practicing here for a couple of months,” Danny said. “I'm going to have to see them around here eventually. I might as well get it out of the way today.”

He hopped off the stage. “Like I said, I'm not running away, dude.”

Will sighed, the sound like air coming out of a balloon. “No, why do something like that when you can get your butt run
over
by the Springers instead?”

“Don't take this the wrong way,” Danny said. “But I don't remember asking for your opinion about any of this.”

“Let me ask
you
something,” Will said. “When have I ever cared whether you asked for my opinion or not?”

“You want me to spot you seven this time?”

Will said, “I don't want your pity. Make it six.”

They were finishing that game when Ty Ross showed up. The first of the Middletown Vikings.

Ty Ross had gotten both taller and skinnier during the summer, which Danny knew from the tryouts.

He also knew Ty was still great.

Could still dribble with either hand, shoot with either hand when he got close in to the basket, see the whole court as if he had two sets of eyes going for him. He would pass the ball if somebody else even remotely had a better shot than he did
every single time.
Sometimes he would just give it up because in addition to all his other qualities as a ballplayer, Ty Ross was completely unselfish, sometimes to a fault. He wasn't the fastest kid in town, wasn't nearly as fast as Danny was, but he knew when to drive to the basket, when to step back and make one from the outside, from as far away as the three-point arc in the gym at Middletown High, when to pull the ball down and just set the offense all over again.

As far as Danny was concerned, Ty knew as much about the way the game should be played as he did. The two of them just seemed to know stuff that other kids their age didn't. Ty had been that way when they played fifth-grade travel together, and when they'd played sixth-grade travel together. He didn't just know more about basketball than the rest of the players, he knew more than the coaches, too.

He sure knew more than any parent yelling at them to do this or that from the stands.

All in the name of being good sports parents, of course.

That even went for Ty's dad, who, according to
Danny's
dad, acted as if he'd invented basketball, not Dr. James Naismith.

“You know those peach baskets Dr. Naismith used for the first basketball games?” Richie Walker had said one time. “Jeff Ross thinks he invented those, too.”

On top of everything else, Ty Ross was such a nice kid that Will Stoddard said it made him physically ill.

He had dark hair, like his father, almost black, cut short this school year, his summer buzz still not having grown all the way out. He was wearing his own baggy basketball shorts, looking even baggier on him because his legs were so skinny they looked like stick-figure legs somebody had drawn on him. He was wearing a maroon Williams College T-shirt that looked to be about three sizes too big. Williams, Danny knew, was where Mr. Ross had gone to school.

Ali Walker had told Danny once that Ty was the player his father had always wanted to be. That he'd been the second-best player on the Vikings team that had won the World Series, behind Richie Walker, and that it had been pretty much the same way in high school. Danny's dad had then selected Syracuse—and the chance to play in front of thirty or forty thousand people every night in the Carrier Dome—after passing on most of the big ACC schools and even schools as far away as UCLA.

Mr. Ross, who had the grades, thought he'd have a better chance to play at a small school like Williams. Only he didn't, his mom said, never getting off the bench there before quitting the team his senior year.

“You know how your father says that the town never got over their team winning the travel-team World Series?” his mom said. “I'm not sure Tyler's dad ever got over being number two to your father during all their growing-up years.”

“So,” Danny remembered saying to her that night, “Mr. Ross was a real number two guard.”

“That's basketball talk, right?”

“Mom,” he said. “You know the point guard is called a one, the shooting guard is called a two, the center—”

“Stop,” she said, and not for the first time when the subject was basketball, “I'll pay the ransom.”

Ty and Danny had been teammates, starters both of them, on the fifth-grade team. Same thing the next year. Just not teammates this year. And maybe not ever again.

Now Danny watched as Ty came walking toward him with that pigeon-toed walk of his, walking straight down the middle of the gym, Danny knowing as he watched him what every kid in town knew already, that for as long as Ty Ross lived in Middletown, he was going to be the best kid walking into
every
gym.

All this time later, Danny thought to himself, it had worked out that a Walker was finally jealous of a Ross when it came to playing basketball.

Ty saw them over by the stage and came over, dribbling his own ball as he did.

“Hey, dude,” Danny said to him.

Ty got right to it, not messing around, not even bothering with a greeting of his own.

“You should have made it,” he said. “I should have called you as soon as I found out. You can ask my mom, I told her that night that you should have made it ahead of a lot of the guys who did.”

It was the closest thing to a speech for him, coming out almost as if he'd rehearsed it.

“Thanks,” Danny said, not knowing what else to say.

Wondering if Ty had expressed that same opinion to his dad, even though Ty was probably as intimidated by Mr. Ross as everybody else in town was.

Ty wouldn't let it go, as if this had been bothering him all week as much as it had bothered Danny himself. “You can play rings around some of the guards they picked ahead of you. And you know
how
to play better than
everybody
they picked ahead of you, that's for sure. And the whole thing is stupid and I wanted you to know it.”

“Quick heads-up?” Will said. “I wouldn't let any of those other nose pickers who got picked ahead of our boy hear you saying that.”

“Will,” Danny said in a sharp voice, “I will pay you to shut up.”

Will said, “I hate to reduce our relationship to money—but how much?” Then he said he was going to beat the soft drink machine out of a Coke, and did they want anything? Danny and Ty both said no.

Now it was just Danny and Ty in the gym.

Ty said, “You want to shoot around a little?”

“Nah,” Danny said. “Will and me have got to be someplace. Maybe next week when you guys are here or something.”

You lied enough, it got easier—that had been his experience, though pretty limited.

“Later,” he said.

“Later,” Ty Ross said.

Danny found Will at the soda machine and told him he was meeting his mom soon, which was technically true, as long as you had a pretty loose definition of the word
soon
.

“I'll call you later,” Danny said, “or check you out on the computer.”

“Either way,” Will said. “You know my motto: We never close.”