I was sitting in the truck in the bumpy gravel parking lot watching Zeph play basketball with the other kids when my neighbor called me and asked: “You still thinking about taking a ride up the coast next weekend?”
“Thinking about it,” I said, though I was really thinking about when I was Zeph’s age and playing on that same court with my friends, practicing our shooting form in the morning and watching the older kids play and argue and goof around at night. So I said, “Lemme call you back a little later,” and flipped my phone shut.
It was the first eighty degree day of the year and Zeph looked good shooting the ball because we put a hoop up in the driveway last summer and I helped him work on his form, on those warm summer evenings when there was no wind and the sun seemed like it wanted to hang around a while longer, like it didn’t want to go down because it would disappoint my son and force him to go inside for dinner.
And presently with the afternoon sun lingering and Zeph and his friends playing two-on-two on one side of the court and the other side empty, that old saying surfaced in my head, Always aim for the back of the rim, which I learned on that same burning asphalt twenty years prior, exerting ourselves more mentally than physically at times because that’s how the game works. It began there during the summer before seventh grade when Mr. Thompson, our English teacher, told my friend Victor that he had a one in a million shot of making it to the NBA, coming from a small town in Maine. So every morning just after dawn I walked and dribbled the ball past dewy lawns and dazed paperboys to the basketball court where Victor was already shooting from two feet away and then four feet and back and back. There were times of serious practice: shooting and dribbling and running drills which must have appeared silly to the people driving by on their way across town to the dump or the redemption center; and then interludes of ludicrous jokes and shooting halfcourt shots and chewing on juvenile philosophy, eschewing limitations: “They tell you you have no shot or a one percent chance or whatever because that’s how they want you to think,” Victor said to me once. “You have to know you’re gonna succeed at whatever you’re doing, because what does anyone know about anyone else? Nothing really.”
Which was true. But I hadn’t told Zeph that story yet because I wanted him to be old enough to understand that it didn’t necessarily have to be about the game of basketball. I watched him run towards me chasing after a loose ball and then grit his teeth when it bounced off the windshield. He picked the ball up and yelled out, “Sorry, dad,” as he skipped back towards the court; and beyond, on a dim court with frayed backboards and bare rims bent down slightly and old school rap music emanating through the open doors of Mick’s low-rider truck, my friends and I pacing around aimlessly as we caught our breath after a long and drawn out game of three-on-three. The sun had disappeared ten minutes ago and it was a night like a lot of other nights in our small mill town. I was supposed to be home before dark, but I wanted to stay, and I couldn’t help but question the definition of ‘dark’. It was almost worth sprinting the three blocks home just to be sure, just to see if maybe I could sprint back and play another game. But then I relented; I was getting hungry. “I gotta get home,” I said. “It’s pretty dark.” Mick gave me a quick look of disappointment, and then he smiled and looked up at the sky as though searching for something and said: “It’s not dark – it’s just – very – not light.”
The basketball court in our town was a moving canvas: a game of fluidity rolling back and forth and a cigarette smoker standing underneath the basket cracking bad jokes and the guys in their pickup trucks nearby drinking Mountain Dew, talking about their lift kits. I remembered the time when Derek Taber tried telling a joke after spending a year in prison downstate: “I saw your mom kicking a can and I asked her if she was moving”, and no one laughed; a few seconds of awkward silence passed and then Victor said to him quite seriously: “Man, you have been gone awhile.” I remembered watching Dan Lovell dunk the ball and hang on the rim and then slap the backboard afterwards. I remembered watching Sherwood inadvertently drink urine out of a Pepsi can because Lovell put it there, and then Sherwood reacting with a laugh and a mild curse word. I remembered sitting on the porch with Victor just before Zeph was born and trading stories already known and told, because they never got old, because the fire tends to spread as you age, though only if you remember where it began.
Eventually the high school kids filtered in and it was nearing dinnertime so I waved Zeph over. He came over, caught his breath, and said: “Can I stay dad, please?”
“Your mother’s gonna have dinner ready in about ten minutes,” I said.
“I’ll walk home before it gets dark. I just wanna watch, please?”
“Before dark,” I said. “No later. I’ll keep some green beans warm.” I smiled. He didn’t like green beans. But he didn’t hear me. He muttered, “Thanks, dad,” and ran back. I knew my wife was going to give me a little hell when I came home alone, but I couldn’t say no to the kid. I envied him.
Ryan S. Lowell is a novelist and short story writer. His work has appeared in Underwood Press: Black Works and the Workers Write Journal. His story Random Uncertainty is forthcoming in the Workers Write Overtime Series, and he is currently working on a novel based in rural Maine. He lives with his wife, son and a crew of rescue pets in South Portland, Maine.