Basketball Disasters (5 page)

Brody walked home with Mason and his dad. Even after a solid hour of running and jumping, Brody kept springing into the air to shoot imaginary baskets, doubtless racking up an ever-higher imaginary score in his head.

“Cut it out, Brody,” Mason said. “Practice is over.”

“Brody has the right idea,” his dad said. “Good job tonight, Brode. Oh, and good job, Mason,” he added, clearly as an afterthought.

Surely his coaching book would say that a coach wasn’t supposed to have favorites. Right now it seemed as if Mason’s dad might have forgotten that particular piece of coaching advice.

On the second colonial-crafts Thursday in Coach Joe’s class, the parent helper was Sheng’s mom, Mrs. Lin, and the colonial craft was making corn-husk dolls.

It was too late in the year for anyone to be able to gather corn husks from a cornfield, so Sheng’s mom had bought several big packages of corn husks from a Mexican food store. Selling corn husks at a food store seemed somewhat strange to Mason.
Even Mason’s mom, who liked to cook all kinds of foods from other countries and cultures, had never yet tried to make Mason eat corn husks or anything wrapped in them.

Mason rolled his moistened corn husks into a little bundle and tied it with a piece of string, as Mrs. Lin had demonstrated. Then he flipped the husks over the tied string and tied them again to form the doll’s head.

Brody was already talking to his doll.

“Now I’m going to make your
arms
,” he told the doll. “I’m going to make you a nice pair of arms!”

The heads didn’t have faces painted on them yet; the students couldn’t draw on the faces until the dolls were all done and had time to dry, or their faces would smear. A smeary face was worse than no face at all. So Brody had to imagine the expression on his doll’s face. He held her—him?—it?—up in front of him and made the doll give a little shake of joyful anticipation.

“My doll’s head is too big,” Mason complained. “I tied the string down too low.”

“A big head is good!” Brody reassured him. “It means your doll will be extra smart because of all those extra brains.”

Mason doubted that greatly.

Nora was working on her doll with quiet competence. Her doll’s arms were already done, complete with hands, and she had tied its waist and fluffed out its long skirts.

“You don’t have any other dolls, do you?” Mason asked her. He had been to Nora’s house a few times and had never seen any dolls or stuffed toys in her room, just her ant farm.

“No. I mean, what’s the point?”

Mason’s thought, exactly.

“Are you going to make your doll a boy or a girl?” Brody asked Mason.

Mrs. Lin had told them they could either give their dolls a long full skirt or tie the corn husks at the bottom of the doll into two sections to form its legs.

Nora gave a little snort. “You mean, is your doll going to have pants or a dress? You aren’t a boy just because you have on pants.” She pointed to her own blue jeans. “Every single girl in our class is wearing pants, even Emma.”

“But this is back then,” Brody said. “In colonial times.”

“I know. But even nowadays, restroom doors have a picture of a person in a dress, and that means women, or a picture of a person in pants, and that means men. Which is dumb.”

“I’m going to make my doll a girl,” Brody said. “She just seems like she’s a girl.”

Mason was going to make his a girl, too, to save the extra step of tying legs.

“I’m going to name you Abigail,” Brody told his doll. “Do you like that name? Abigail?”

The doll gave another little happy shake.

“She likes it,” Brody said.

Dunk had finished his doll. He walked over to Mason’s desk with it. Dunk’s doll—if you could call it that—was the worst-looking corn-husk doll Mason had ever seen. No one could have guessed that this bunch of corn husks tied in random places was a corn-husk doll if it hadn’t been made during a class on how to make corn-husk dolls.

Dunk made his corn-husk doll leap into the air and then jerked it forward.

“Two!” Dunk shouted.

Mason figured out that Dunk’s doll had just made a slam dunk, scoring two points for the Killer Whales.

In the effort, though, one of the corn husks slipped from its string and dropped onto Mason’s desk.

“Your doll is falling apart,” Mason pointed out politely.

“Yeah, well, after our first game, your team is going to be falling apart.”

Another corn husk came loose as Dunk waved his doll in Mason’s face.

“Actually, your doll just
fell
apart,” Mason said.

Mason was pretty good with snappy lines.

But it would take a lot more than snappy lines to beat the Killer Whales in basketball.

The snow had long melted by the weekend, so when Mason and Brody were outside on Saturday afternoon playing catch with Dog, no telltale footprints betrayed Dog for having run twice into the Taylors’ yard, chasing his ball. Besides, surely Mrs. Taylor didn’t sit peering out her window every single minute of the day just in case a dog crossed over her property line.

Brody’s next throw went wild, and this time Dog did dart all the way to the Taylors’ front walk
to retrieve it. But Mason couldn’t get too stressed about it. Dog wasn’t peeing or pooping in the Taylors’ yard, he wasn’t making any noise except for one or two friendly barks that couldn’t bother anybody, and he had never bitten anyone, ever. Well, except for chewing up Puff the Plainfield Dragon.

How could anybody not like Dog? Or mind the sight of him out playing on a sunny autumn afternoon?

Then, a few minutes later—to Mason’s utter disbelief—a panel van with
CITY OF PLAINFIELD ANIMAL CONTROL
written on the side pulled up in front of his yard. A man in a green uniform got out of the van, carrying a clipboard.

“Hey, kids,” the man said. “Whose dog is this?”

“Mine,” Mason and Brody answered together. Dog belonged to both of them equally, and they both loved him equally, and if someone was going to get in trouble because of Dog, they would both get in trouble equally.

“Are your folks around?” the man asked.

Before Mason could stammer out an answer, his dad was there, coming down the front walk.

“Hi, I’m Dan Dixon,” he introduced himself. “Is there a problem?”

“One of your neighbors called us about an off-leash dog running wild,” the animal-control man explained. “Said it was this fellow here.”

“But surely you can have a dog off leash in your own yard,” Mason’s dad said.

“That’s right. But only in your own yard.”

“He wasn’t running wild!” Mason burst out.

“Dog would never run wild,” Brody chimed in.

“We were just playing fetch—”

“And one time—well, a couple of times—”

“The ball went over to her yard, and Dog ran to get it, and he was in her yard for a total of—”

“Two seconds!”

“The boys are telling the truth,” Mason’s dad said. “They’re very careful when they walk Dog, and they always clean up after him.”

The animal-control man shook his head in an embarrassed way. “Look. I’m not going to give you a ticket for an off-leash violation. Frankly, well, the complaint strikes me as unreasonable. But I have to inform you that it will be on your dog’s record now that there has been a complaint. So, boys, keep your
dog out of the neighbor’s yard, okay? Just keep him out of her yard.”

He gave the four of them a friendly smile and even reached down and rubbed Dog’s head the proper way behind his long, silky ears.

“Did you hear that, boys?” Mason’s dad asked.

Both boys nodded.

Then the man gave another good-natured grin, climbed back into his van, and drove away.

“I
am
going to get that
NO OLD LADIES
sign,” Mason muttered, once his dad had gone back into the house.

“But, Mason, she never comes out of her house, anyway.”

Brody was right. Mason had never seen any sign of Mrs. Taylor, except for that telltale movement of the curtain in the upstairs window.

“So what are we going to do?” Mason asked.

“I don’t know,” Brody said. “Keep Dog out of her yard, I guess. But tonight, when I go trick-or-treating with Sheng and Julio, I’m not going to go to her house.”

Mason wasn’t going to go trick-or-treating at all. His costume was too hard to explain. So he was going
to stay at home and help hand out candy to people who didn’t mind wearing costumes.

Mason gave Dog a huge hug, hoping that Mrs. Taylor was looking out of her window now to see what true love looked like, something a mean old, nasty old dog hater could never know.

At basketball practice on Tuesday night—the last practice before the first game of the season, to be played on Saturday morning at ten—Mason’s dad handed out the schedule for all the games, six of them. On the schedule the teams were identified by coach and number, and not by name. There were six teams total for fourth-grade boys; Mason was on team number five. He had no idea which team was the Killer Whales.

What if Dunk’s team was in a different league altogether? That would be extremely wonderful, but things that were extremely wonderful, in Mason’s experience, tended to fall under the heading “too good to be true.”

It was interesting that there was no category of things that were too bad to be true, at least not that Mason had ever heard of.

No new kids had joined the team. Mason’s dad repeated his plea.

“Guys, we really need three or four more players!”

Mason wondered if what his dad really meant was “three or four players who can actually play.”

During the dribbling drill, Dylan’s ball was as hopelessly out of control as the previous week, and Dylan still couldn’t throw, catch, shoot, or guard. Dylan didn’t have much hustle, either, though if you played as badly as Dylan, there was a lot to be said for keeping a low profile.

For the second half of the practice, Coach Dad split the boys into two teams to play three-on-three. Mason had Dylan on his team—of course—and a boy named Kevin. Brody’s team had Matt and Jeremy. Jeremy was probably, all around, the best player on the team. Coach Dad’s division of the players didn’t seem very fair to Mason.

“So that we can tell the teams apart,” Coach Dad said, “one team will be the Shirts and the other will be the Skins. Brody, your team will be the Shirts. Mason, your team will be the Skins.”

Skins?

Kevin caught on more quickly and pulled his
T-shirt up over his head, leaving his bare chest exposed. Dylan copied him. Mason had to do the same, but it made him feel strange. It was one thing to take off your shirt in the summertime, running through the sprinkler with Dog and Brody. It was another thing to take off your shirt in front of people who might think your chest looked funny: too fat, too flabby, too skinny, too scrawny, too white. Dylan’s chest, for example, definitely looked too fat, too flabby,
and
too white.

Mason liked the comfort of nice, plain, solid-colored T-shirts—blue, green, yellow, red—with no words or pictures on them. Every day Mason wore the same thing: a plain T-shirt, blue jeans in the winter or khaki shorts in the summer, brown socks. He cast a longing glance at his plain blue T-shirt, crumpled up on the floor in a miserable-looking ball. He didn’t know if he could make any baskets without it.

The practice game began.

Jeremy scored right away. Then the Skins got the ball.

“Get open, Mason, so Kevin can pass to you!” Coach Dad called.

Mason tried, but dogged little Brody stayed on him.

Kevin passed to Dylan instead. Bad mistake. When Dylan dropped the ball, Matt dove for it and passed it to Jeremy, who took the shot. The ball teetered on the rim but didn’t go in.

“Rebound!” Coach Dad shouted. “Mason, rebound! Good job, Brody!”

Brody leaped for the rebound, got it, shot again, and scored.

“Good job, Brody!”

That was how the rest of the game seemed to Mason. Either his dad was shouting, “Get open, Mason!” or “Mason, get on your man!” or “Mason, rebound!” or else he was shouting, “Good job, Brody!” or “Way to go, Brody!” or “Great hustle, Brody!”