Ride Around Shining (13 page)

The last night of our stay
was the full moon after the equinox, the night of the hunter's moon. The night meant so many things in the Pharaoh's world, no one could keep count of them. For ease, the servants just regarded it as his own invented holiday, tied to nothing so much as his will to have it. The night almost marked the beginning of the regular season, and it almost marked Halloween. To a player on an active roster, the weeks of two-a-days and curfews and preseason games were over, and the future was writ large in games with stakes to them and post-victory nightlife and a holiday full of masked license, sexy versions of all the professions, and people who dressed up as everyone with a salable jersey, even you. That everyone kept confusing the day with the actual equinox seemed only to further our license to do anything.

Pharaoh did anything better than anyone. We woke on the day of the hunter's moon to find a champagne brunch. Goat appeared back in good standing, and the Pharaoh was telling him dirty jokes. All the rules we'd just had time enough to learn were broken. Odette had a dress on before noon and off by two, so all the really late risers mistook her evening pajamas for morning ones.

I drank a little bubbly with my coffee and eggs, and when I was called to help strike the video-game tent all my movements felt drifty. We packed the gear into carts, and Wedge directed a temp crew in raising a larger tent for the evening's festivities. It was striped red and black and green and had a hole in the middle to allow a fire. It was a perfect fall day, and when the pavilion was ready we couldn't sweep it clean for the yellow leaves that blew through, hushing over the shadowy stone and clinging in the fire pit, waiting for evening and the match that would turn them into light.

Goat hadn't required much attending. The afternoon after he was put in my care, I found him sprawled emotionally in the empty living room and asked if he'd like anything done to his car. He told me he'd been quoted several thousand for the dent on his fender, and asked if I could hammer it out. I could see he was lacking in what the Pharaoh would consider a firm code. That day he'd started in on the champagne hard, and I figured I only had eight or ten hours to head him off with a value system before it was too late.

The guests began to arrive around sundown. One by one, Maxim ushered them into the dining room, all the outlaw names of a gone era of Portland ball. There was Damon Stoudamire, who'd been caught with foil balls of marijuana in every major airport in the West, and Qyntel the dog-fighter, and Nick Van Exel, who had shoved a ref over the scorer's table in his younger days. Even Bonzi Wells came—Bonzi, who was thought to be the worst of them, though no one could ever remember anything really infamous he'd done. If Rasheed himself had walked through the door, shouting militant slogans, I couldn't have been any more excited. These were the Jail Blazers, assembled at the end of the nineties in a flurry of trades without regard for money or image or chemistry, only the fact that these men could jump a little higher, run a little faster, and make everybody who thought of a textbook layup as a timeless and important virtue cover their eyes with new and greater despair. At their peak they were the most talented team in the league, and but for a fourth-quarter meltdown in Game Seven of the 2000 Western Finals, they would have likely brought Portland their first championship since Bill Walton rode his bicycle to games and made all those things the bachelor believed about flowers and koans seem manly and tenable. But the collapse proved to a city that wanted to believe it that no amount of black talent could win a championship without heeding white virtues like disciplined back-cuts and modesty, virtues the city then demanded from the team and did not receive. The race war ran cold and unadmitted. For years, thousands paid the gate with bitter faces to come and boo their twelve former heroes and hope to get the finger from courtside so they could feel their animus justified. At last Wallace was traded—no one seemed to care for whom—and canned bells of jubilation rang out all night from the city's sports radio stations. Soon Portland had a team they could love again: awful, but beautifully docile.

One by one the Pharaoh embraced his old teammates, and pointed them to the buffet table where plateaued pyramids of gleaming rice flanked golden bowls of black beans and platters of jerk chicken and pork. I watched them go by me and felt a strange letdown at their failure to not give a fuck. I'd understood that it was important that they did not, that none be given, not to anyone who didn't stand up to their inscrutable scrutiny and pass the judgment of their obscure codes, formed in early years on back lots off streets so hard people like me could never hope to hear of them. For simplicity's sake, I'll say I assumed a fuck would certainly not be given to any white people. But now here these men were, a regular outlaw convention, and they just looked like some guys who dressed well and were excited to eat some dinner, and I was let down. I got in line behind them, and when Qyntel clattered a serving spoon back into the dish just outside my reach, he apologized in a soft voice.

In the pavilion the fire burned so high I thought the tent would catch. Already strange women were dancing in the firelight. Two had flat faces, and as I got near I saw they were wearing cardboard Bill Clinton masks. There was a cascade of masks lying on a green-clothed table next to the night's first flight of champagne, probably two dozen Bills and Hillarys, a Chelsea, and some Socks.

The dancing held a similar mix of the ritualistic and the improvised. Fits of unity saw the women join hands and clomp their feet together, but there weren't yet enough of them to circle the fire, and as I watched they seemed to decide they'd put on a respectable display of sisterhood and the circle dissolved into knots of ordinary clubbing. Joseph Jones didn't look impressed. He had a dapper tan suit and a dour, businesslike face, and I kept seeing him standing joyless at the edge of the light as the evening rushed on and wondering what had brought him there.

I heard a whistle, and saw Goat's bony arm rise in the flamy light. Next to him, Belmont lifted a champagne bottle and swung it like a sad pendulum.

“Bottle service,” Belmont cried, and I brought them a new one. I tore the foil and loosed the wire cap, then held out the corked bottle.

“You do it,” Goat said. “We'll put your eye out.”

Grasping the neck, I gave the cork a sharp turn. The bones in my wrist cracked with alacrity and the bottle-smoke rose up.

“Gotta let it pop,” Goat chided, pointing at the cork in my hand. “Let the ladies know we're here!”

“They know we're here, handsome,” Belmont said.

“I can open another,” I said.

They turned to one another. I'd meant this as a rebuke but they just looked inspired.

“That'd be wasteful,” Belmont pointed out wistfully.

“'S'all right,” Goat assured him. “We'll recycle 'em. Bring over another and get y'self a glass,” he directed.

I got the bottle and watched Goat struggle with the foil. They'd begun at brunch and gone right through. I guess they'd been training for the rigors of this one way or another, as they were still semicoherent. The primary change in Goat was that his brooding sensitivity seemed to have been replaced by an aggressive forwardness that carried with it an indefinite change in dialect.

“Bel and I were just talkin',” Goat confided. “They treat you folks real nice here.”

I nodded out our cumulative gratitude.

“Ram treat his people right,” Belmont said.

Goat threw the balled foil off into the trees. “You better watch it, though,” he said, pointing a wavering finger at me. “They're coming for that cush job of yours.”

“How's that?”

“Pharaoh already tried to hit me up once to get one of those Jones boys to do some work for me. One of them refugees. Why do you think we're here? It's like when they give you a free vacation in Hawaii but then they're all over you to buy a yacht or something.”

We both looked over to Belmont for confirmation, but he just laughed.

“Imagine you with a servant, living outta yo trunk! I mean, I seen Joe here tonight, but nobody hit me up for shit yet.”

“Maybe Calyph will stay loyal,” Goat said. He turned back to me abruptly. “If not, though, better grab a piece tonight on your way out. Bet you could.”

“How's that?” I asked again, just to be companionable, and reached to take a drop from the bottle.

“Odette's going off tonight,” he said. “Just be in the vicinity!” His eyes were wide and a little uncertain, like he was striving to convince himself his excitement had a basis.

Belmont hissed through his teeth and looked around doubtfully.

“It's true, Bel. I know her type.”

“She don't got a type. I best stay clear of all that.”

Goat worked the wire loose at last. “That serving girl looks nice, too. What's her name?”

Belmont rubbed his hand over his small, close-shaven head. “Unless Pharaoh, like, offers you somethin', Luke, I'd keep off that, too. You don't know how he feels about them doing what with who.”

“That's true,” I said, seeing an opening for my wisdom at last. They both looked over at me strangely, as if this were the opinion of a new, fourth party.

Goat spat through his teeth in defiance. “I think it'd be all right. We're his guests here. Besides, you ever see how he, like, points 'em at us, almost?”

Belmont scoffed. “Be honest? All I see is your gapin' face.”

“Is that what you see?” Goat put one of his knobby hands in front of his mouth, pressing his knuckles against his teeth. His eyes seemed to screw up and grow smaller. “Bel, I know what I am. I'm that man who got cast outta the palace. Now I just wander around the land in my beat-up car, trying to get my broke body right, trying to find a way back in. Into that sweet life I knew. But Pharaoh, he took me in here, and I'm grateful. I don't want nothin' that's his. Just, a girl's what tells you you had a sweet time. A girl's what tells you what you should remember.” His singsong lapsed, but his face was still alive with the bright determination to show us he knew something hard-won and inarticulable.

Silently we drank from our golden cups, until he recovered himself.

“Maybe that Shida's all right,” Belmont said. “All I'm sayin' is, if he pointin' Odette around, I'm a damn Latter Day.”

I gave an extra-strong nod to this. Goat frowned at me like he was yielding the point but wanted us to know that all this prudence oppressed him. He sighed. “See,” he said, shaking the unopened champagne lightly. “You gotta foam the bottle. When you open it, everybody looks, they wanna see some foam come out. Makes 'em feel like they won somethin'.”

He stood and popped the cork off into the night, and a spurt of foam fell dripping onto the stone.

“Champions of the world,” Belmont said softly.

I went away and stood at the edge of the light and watched the dancing. Ras had joined the floor, the first man, doing a spry, unassuming shuffle near the two Clintons. Nearby, Shida too had begun to dance. She moved like a dervish, scything the air. She was hypnotic to watch because nothing she did showed she wanted to be seen. The grace seemed to be happening for its own sake, for her own joy, rather than to call attention. There was even something of her usual reserve that clung to her, in spite of her exact, dynamic steps. She danced so sure, but toward the edge of the light, as if practicing, brushing the dust off stores of moves. She might have been alone.

I felt a strange attraction to her, unpossessive and detached. I couldn't find anything to compare it to. With no intention of dancing, I went and stood by her. As soon as she saw me she stopped cold.

“What's up, harmless?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Okay.” She dipped her shoulder and turned smoothly back into her solitary, scything dance.

After a few steps she turned back, with as much abrupt grace as before, and stopped again, dead.

“You still here,” she laughed.

“Yeah.”

She turned up her hands helplessly. “Let's sit down, I guess.”

We took seats on the Pharaoh's chaise, which had been pushed into an empty corner of the pavilion and strung with two balloons that nudged together, looking like failed fun. The glare from the bonfire tapered into dim and we could see out at everyone moving through the smoke.

“Funny old night,” she said. “VIP Halloween.”

“Dead players rise. Servants become masters.”

“How you figure?”

“It's a masked dance, right? That means we lose our identities for the night.”

She laughed. “Even with a Bubba on, you still the only short white guy for miles.”

I straightened enough to look down at her and she rolled her eyes. We gazed out at the backlit whirl of lanky figures, the towering men and thin, careful women. I thought I saw some of the old players join the dance at the far edge of the light, their figures wavering in the heat.

“Seriously, though,” she pressed. “We still the help. Stay harmless. Don't go misbehaving with anybody important.”

I looked curiously at the flashing whites of her eyes. The air was full of warnings, and then I wondered if this was an invitation to misbehave with the unimportant. “This your first one of these?”

“I've only been here nine months.”

“What did you do before?”

“If I told you I used to be on the dance team, would you laugh in my face?”

I laughed silently in her face, until my own froze with realization.

“You and Pharaoh?”

She looked at me fiercely. “You think pretty high of dancers!”

“So you didn't?” I figured there must have been some courtship, but her face broke out into further indignation.

“When I met him, mufucker was drivin' a car with Ben Franklin painted on the hood—Ben smokin' a spliff rolled up with a hundred. I turned him down till he thought his number was no. You think I'd still be here, with Odette here, if I said yes? Shit . . .”