This is the Part Where You Laugh (5 page)

While I shoot, I start to think about things, so after 100 makes, I go back inside and leave my basketball by the front door. In the guest room, I lift the throw pillow, unzip it, and pull out my jar. I put the jar in the bottom of my backpack next to my water bottle. Yell, “Grandpa, I'll be back.”

Grandpa's watching MLB TV when I walk by. He doesn't say anything.

I bike down Coburg to the 126 overpass. Check the cages there. The dugouts. Walk back on each of the deer paths through the ivy. Find a man sleeping with a cardboard sign on his chest that says,

WAR VET—MONEY OR FOOD?

ANYTHING HELPS

He doesn't wake up as I step past him. I find an empty tent where the trail stops, the tent door next to a pile of garbage: fast-food containers, half a T-shirt with a brown smear on it, a bike tire, two wine bottles, a green Coleman propane tank.

I bike past the Kendall Auto Group, over the Ferry Street Bridge. The wraparound. The gravel riverbank. There's a blue plastic tarp covering someone sleeping. Or not sleeping. There's no movement. No breathing. I sneak up and pull back the corner of the tarp. It's two big backpacks lying end to end, the size of a person but not a person. I put the tarp back in place. Fold the edges underneath a backpack.

I push my bike along the river path through Skinner's Butte Park. See a man carving a walking stick with a sheath knife, ornamenting the wood. He says, “See this tribal shit here, man?”

“Yeah,” I say, “that's good.” Then I keep going. Keep searching for her. I do this sometimes. Sometimes I just think about it, in the middle of something, and I want to find her right then, I can't even explain why.

I bike up the slope at the bridge before the rose gardens. Find three people sleeping at the chain-link. All of them too young, in their early thirties or something like that.

I lean my bike against my thigh. Swing my backpack off my shoulders. Get out my water bottle and take a drink. Stare at the river. There are riffles before the bridge, shallows across the water to the north bank, the deepest section only two feet. It's hot and I think about swimming, but no one swims right here for whatever reason.

I look upriver and down. There are too many places to look, too many places to hide. I put my water bottle back in the bottom of the pack and slide it on, tightening the straps.

I wonder if she's using a lot. I'm sure she's using some, but it's hard to know how much. There have to be times when she doesn't, when she runs out of money, or she feels guilty, or she tries to quit. Sometimes, when I was little, she'd talk about quitting. She'd say it like she was talking about building a dream house. She'd draw in the air in front of her, and I'd always wonder what she was drawing since it didn't match up to what she was saying. I'd watch her hands wave around, her fingers draw lines in the air, lines across and lines down, and she'd say, “I wouldn't even need it anymore. I wouldn't even think about it.”

One time, when I was 10, she got methadone and quit for three weeks. She seemed okay, her hands a little shaky, but still okay. Then one night she locked herself in the bathroom and she didn't come out. It got quiet, real quiet, and I had that feeling again where everything tightens up, my shoulders too high, the muscles in my neck clenching, and I knocked on the bathroom door but she didn't answer me.

“Mom?” I said. “Are you okay?”

Then she wasn't using methadone anymore, and some days she didn't come home at all.

I'm thinking about that time and staring over my shoulder at the bridge, but I'm not really staring at anything. I can hear the cars clunking the metal splits, and the low sound of all those cars' motors running together.

I get on my bike and start pedaling back.

I shoot 200 shots in the driveway on the backboard that Grandpa and I hung when I was 13. I remember how happy I was that Grandpa was willing to put it up with me. He found the set on Craigslist for $45, and we spent a Saturday afternoon measuring and remeasuring, making sure the rim was at 10 feet exactly, sliding the backboard up and down over and over until we were sure and we could draw a mark on the siding. Then we spent 20 minutes making sure everything was level—the rim level in both directions, and the bottom of the backboard level straight across. We kept tilting it and checking, tilting it some more, and Grandpa tapped wood shims in at the bottom, and we kept checking because we wanted it to be perfect. Then we bolted it down with lag screws.

As we worked, I kept telling him, “Thank you. Thank you so much, Grandpa.”

And he kept saying, “It's fine. Really. Don't worry about it.”

That was before Grandma was sick, before everything was different, before things weren't as good between him and me. That was before he started taking whatever Grandma got from the pharmacy.

I stand in front of the backboard and shoot 100 right-handed shots, then 100 left-handed shots. I start close and move out, the way I always do.

Then I walk over to Creature's house and knock on his front door. It seems like no one's there, but I keep knocking anyway since I can never really tell. His mom always keeps the blinds down and the house dark. She sleeps about 15 hours a day, eats weird food, and has this thing about exercise videos when she's not sleeping. Last time I was over there she kicked us off the Xbox so she could do one of her exercise DVDs.

So we gave up the TV then and Creature's mom got into a really tight outfit and started doing Tae Bo. She's always in good shape from doing those videos, and she's young too. She was maybe 16 when she had Creature, so I think she's still sort of in her prime physically, even if she's kind of crazy. Anyway, we were eating some cereal at the table and she was exercising right there in front of us, and it was hard not to watch her, so I just kept watching.

Creature reached across the table and smacked me on the side of my head. “What the hell are you looking at?”

I put my head down and took a quick bite.

Creature said, “This is ridiculous. Can you watch any more of this?”

“No,” I said, but his mom was getting sweaty now and her clothes were so tight, and she really wasn't that old. As long as I forgot that she was Creature's mom, I could watch her all day long.

I knock on Creature's front door again.

The door opens a crack and his mom's face appears in the line of light. She looks like she just woke up. “Travis?”

“Oh hey, Mrs. M., is Creature…I mean…is Malik here?”

“No,” she says, and combs her hair with her fingers. Smiles at me.

“Do you know where he is?”

“He's over hanging out with that Jill girl again.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah,” she says, “I think you and I feel the same about that.” Creature's mom licks her fingers, flattens her hair in the front. “I told him not to go over there anymore, but he doesn't listen to me.” She slides the last few strands of hair behind her ears. Takes a deep breath and opens the door wider. “Wanna come in?” She's in a Lycra suit with a low V-neck. She plays with the collar a little, kind of peeling it back. Purses her lips.

I don't know how to feel when she acts like this. I don't know if she's actually flirting with me or just being friendly, and also, she's Creature's mom.

“Uh,” I say, “I better go try to find Malik over at Jill's.”

“Okay,” she says, and stops playing with her collar. “If he's there, talk some sense into him?”

“I'll try,” I say, then I hop off the porch.

I dribble crossovers all the way to Jill's house and I'm sweating by the time I get there. Jill's house is a blue mobile home at the end of the second loop, a quarter mile from Malik's. Her porch is covered in old Astroturf, patchy and thin, and the plastic railing that goes around the front is missing six of its dowels.

When I knock on her door, I hear music playing inside but nobody answers. I knock again. Her porch faces south and it's hot standing on that patchy Astroturf. I wait for a minute, then knock again, and jog back down the steps. I start to dribble in the direction of home, but I sort of begin to play a game in my head and get trapped in a full-court press by invisible defenders trying to keep me from crossing midcourt. I cut right, go behind my back, and sprint 30 feet. Then I pretend to take an inbounds going the other direction and break the press that way too. After that, it's sort of back and forth for a while. I'm sweating and dribbling hard against the defenders in my head when Creature comes out of the house.

He's sweating too. He says, “Whoa, T, that guy was all over you.” He points at the air behind me. “And that guy's a monster.” Creature smiles.

I pick up my dribble. “Come on, man. What are you doing at Jill's again? I thought you said you weren't coming back here anymore.”

Creature leans down to tie his shoelaces. He doesn't even have his ball with him.

I say, “Did you forget something?”

“Oh, damn,” he says. “My basketball.”

He jogs back up the steps and knocks on the door. Jill opens it and kisses him long and slow. I don't like to see that. Then she hands him his basketball and pushes on his face.

He steps back and says, “You can't push me away. I'll see you again soon.”

“Soon, baby.” She winks at him.

Creature and I dribble down the street without talking.

When we get close to his house, Creature says, “I know what you're thinking.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” he says, “that I'm 18 and she's 24.”

I shrug. “I was really wondering how NBA guards can drive straight, go up right, switch to left, and still lay it in soft.”

Creature says, “She already has two kids, and I know that.” He dribbles right, right to right, then left to left, then changes to crossovers and jukes. “But,” he says, “those kids have nothing to do with me.”

“They could,” I say. “You could be the next baby daddy.” I smile at him.

He points at me. “No, no, no,” he says. “That's never going to happen.”

I dribble through my legs, turn, and dribble through my legs again. “How'd you meet her anyway? How'd all of this start?”

He says, “I didn't tell you?”

I shake my head.

“Oh, it was weird. She's at the end of my newspaper route one morning. She's just sitting on the porch looking hella fly.”

“Just sitting on her porch early in the morning?”

“Yep, six o'clock. Just about when I finish my route and go home. It was like she knew I was coming. She was wearing this coat that didn't really cover her dress and this dress that didn't really cover her body.”

“At six in the morning?”

“Oh baby, I mean it looked like she'd just put it on for me right then,” he says. “Not that I was complaining. Nobody else in this park looks super fine at six in the morning. Mostly I get to see old guys in stained boxers or women all hunched over with their dentures out.”

“Huh,” I say.

“Don't ‘huh' me. You'd have done the exact same thing in my position. She looked super fine with her messy mascara and her slinky lingerie under that tiny dress, and her kids were with their daddy that weekend, so there was nobody else home. There was nothing I could do about it.”

“Nothing?”

“Well, you know, I'm a man.” Creature palms his ball and stretches out his arms wide on both sides like that old Michael Jordan poster I used to have on my wall.

I do a quick crossover. “ ‘Nothing' because you're a man?”

Creature copies my crossover move but does it a little lower and a little smoother. Sometimes I feel like I'm oatmeal and he's Cream of Wheat.

“Trust me,” he says, “if you saw Jill in lingerie, you'd be going back
twice
a day. No doubt. Maybe three times.”

For some reason, right then I think of Creature's mom in her workout gear. I dribble in place and get sort of carried away for a second, but then I stop myself and shake my head.

We're back at my house then, and we shoot for a while in the driveway.

I clang a miss off the side of the rim, and Creature retrieves the ball. “Do you want to play under the bridge with me tomorrow tonight? There's a big pickup game going on. Lots of older players, small-college players, a few guys down from Portland.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Let's do that.”

We walk over by the porch to drink water out of the hose.

Creature says, “How's your grandma?”

I shake my head.

“That bad, huh?”

“I can tell it's getting real bad. She won't talk about it, but I know.”

Creature bends down and reties his shoelaces. He says, “Have you asked her directly? Have you said, ‘Grandma, what's really going on?' ”

“No. I don't know why.”

“Talk to her, then. See what's up.”

“Okay.” I palm my basketball against my wrist, run into the driveway, and try to dunk, but I get rim-checked, same as always.

Grandma doesn't have the TV on. The room's nearly dark, one night-light plugged into the wall on her side of the bed. She looks asleep so I start to turn around, but she says, “Come on in, sweetie. I was just resting.”

I go and sit on the side of her bed. “Hey, Grandma. How are you?”

“Good, sweetie, good.”

I feel the thick veins on the back of her hand. In the light, they're bright blue, but now I can't see the color. I say, “How are you really doing?” I say it like Creature told me to. I want her to tell me the truth. And she can hear it in my voice.

“Oh, you know…,” she says.

I put my hand on her head then, where her hair is brittle, where it feels like strands of nylon.

Grandma sighs.

I say, “Are you gonna lose your hair again?”

“Yes,” she says.

“So it's bad again?” I just want her to tell me. I just want the truth.

“Who knows?” she says. “I'm not even sure the doctors do.”

I rub her scalp with the ends of my fingers and she closes her eyes. I had a dream recently that she was my kid. It was a weird dream because she was old and I was young, just like in real life, but she was my kid anyway, and she was sick, and I was always sitting by her bed. In the dream, she called me Dad and I nodded every time she said that, but when I woke up I was sweating and I had to get up and walk around to clear my head.

I say, “What did the doctors tell you?”

“Not much, sweetie, not much.”

I wait for her to say more, but she doesn't.

“Grandma, would you tell me if it was real bad? Would you?”

She pats my hand. “You're a sweet boy, and it's not your job to worry about me.”

I think about her being bald again, that strange yellow wig she wore two years ago, the one that reminded me of McDonald's French fries. I don't know why. I say, “But I'll worry about you anyway.”

“I know, sweetie. I know.” She reaches up and touches my shoulder. “Are you still doing all of those push-ups and pull-ups this summer?”

“Yeah.”

“Good,” she says. “This is going to be a great year for you.”

When she says that, I remember the news cameras. I remember how they were there on the court, how I looked over when I was sitting on the bench after I got ejected and the game finally resumed. All three cameras were pointed at me. I say, “I hope so. We all know last year wasn't a good year.”

Grandma smiles. “Hopefully, that's all over now. Hopefully, those coaches will let that be in the past.”

Just then, down the hall, the crowd cheers in the baseball game that Grandpa's watching, and we hear Grandpa say, “Oh yes. Oh yes. Run, you son-of-a-bitch! Yes!”

Grandma smiles.

The game gets quiet again and Grandpa mutters something but I can't hear what it is.

Grandma says, “I heard that there might be some sort of monster in the lake.”

“Did Grandpa tell you that?”

She closes her eyes. “Everyone's talking about it.”

That makes me happy. I tried to downplay it with Grandpa so he'd be even more sure, so he'd stick with his opinion. But Grandma is generally more reserved. She has to be encouraged to believe in something. “Could be something big,” I say. “I guess people are saying that. So maybe we should go out and look for it tomorrow evening when the light's good. I could paddle for us and you could try to spotlight whatever it is. Wanna just hold the flashlight?”

She adjusts her head on her pillows. “I don't know, sweetie, I'm pretty tired these days.”

I say, “I could carry you to the canoe. I could put you in there with pillows and blankets. Then I'd do all of the paddling. It'll be like last time when you were sick.”

Grandma smiles. “Those were fun nights.”

“Yeah, I'll paddle and you'll tell stories,” I say. “I always loved your stories. They always made me happy.”

She turns her face away from me. Says, “I don't know if I'm strong enough to do anything like that right now. I don't feel good if I'm moving.”

I lean over and kiss her forehead, and when I do, I realize that she's crying.

“It's okay, Grandma.”

“I'm just so tired,” she says. “I probably need my sleep now.”

“Okay.” I stand up.

She still has her head turned away. “Good night, sweetie.”

I feel bad about pushing her. I want to say I'm sorry, but I don't. Instead, I just say, “Good night, Grandma.”

After I close her door, I go out on the back porch and stare at the lake. I try not to cry myself, but I do anyway.

On the other side of the glass, Grandpa jumps up off the couch and slides the glass door open. He says, “The Giants have two men on base. Only one out.”

“Good, Grandpa.”

“No, it's not good. It's excellent. You have to come in and watch this.”

“No thanks. I'm going down to my tent now.”

“With two men on base?”

“Yeah,” I say. “But let me know what happens in the morning, okay?”

Grandpa doesn't understand how I could walk out on a game situation like that. He looks at me like I'm trying to eat soup with a fork.

I say, “Goodnight, Grandpa.” Turn and walk down to my tent.

I keep my tent flap open. Try to read but can't. None of the books I have seem interesting. After a while, I hear Grandpa come out on the porch. I click my headlamp off and watch him pack a bowl. He smokes it down, then packs another and smokes that one down too. I lie on my bag and watch him puff. With the porch light in his face, he can't see me down the hill.

He goes back inside.

I have to piss, so I get up and slip on my shoes, walk up the hill and down the street to Mr. Tyler's house. No one's out at this time of night. I look both ways but don't see anything moving—no cats, no people, no cars, no dogs.

As I'm pissing on Mr. Tyler's porch, I think about the time he called Creature “a dirty little coon.”