Ride Around Shining (19 page)

“Jess,” he said, grasping my unoffered hand. “I'm back in!”

“What?”

“Toronto signed me. Moon's out for the year,” he said.

“Congratulations,” I said. “Why are you here?”

“Toronto's in town. I'm suiting up tomorrow.”

“What happened to Moon?”

“Someone shot him in the leg or something,” he said. “Terrible.”

“Terrible,” I repeated.

“I love Canada, man. I can't wait. They're weak at the three, and I should get some better overseas offers now.”

“Where've you been since the coast?” I was surprised to find him with the Pharaoh. Savier had seemed to despise him even before the night he'd attempted every available wrong, and I couldn't see their having any lasting relation.

“I hung around awhile,” he said vaguely. “Went up and down the coast looking at some beaches. Had a tryout in L.A. I was on my way back north to run a camp in Coeur d'Alene when I got the call. Right off I called up Savier. I wanted to make things right with him.”

“Sure.”

“You should make things right, too,” he said, in this earnest let's-all-take-the-straight-road kind of voice.

“I was just bathing,” I said.

“Right!” he laughed. “Well, all's fair. They're engaged now, did you hear? He asked her the day we left. I'd want Odette locked down, too, after that.”

“Sure,” I repeated vaguely, half disbelieving him.

“Savier's going to hook me up with a good staff once I get signed and settled,” he hurried on. “We're starting small, but I owe him that. He knows how to do it, right? Maybe he could help you find another position.”

“I got a position,” I said.

Again he laughed carelessly, and scratched at the growth of stubble on his cheek. It was as though having a job again had stripped him of any of his remaining likable vulnerabilities. “Hell, cut him out of it, right? You and me, Jess. Canada! Who knows? I'm serious, I could use you. Think it over.”

He dipped into his pocket and I thought he was going to dole out a freshly dried business card that said “Lucas Montaigne, SF, Toronto Raptors.” Instead he handed me two tickets to the game. In that mood, he'd have given them out to the men on the corner drumming on caulk buckets—every open gesture he could make reinforced his own triumphant return.

I thanked him and told him I'd think it over, and then I got on. The Pharaoh had taken his anger out on me in the briefest and least demeaning way possible—he had punched me almost without breaking stride, and I doubted I was worthy of a second scene. All the same, I didn't linger. To remain with Goat was to despise him for the man he was, and myself for tolerating him. Behind it all lay the memory of Shida, and the one part of that evening when my misbehavior was not in some sense a success. At the end of the block I turned back and found myself wishing to see the Pharaoh, to see someone with a code to judge me by, but there was only Montaigne, dangling his legs over the door.

I had to be in by seven-thirty
the morning after. Going down Macadam, a fat kid in a white headband ran across the median wearing an old Randolph jersey, and I thought again of all the rest of the team, spread out around the city in the bleary morning light. I'd always hated the athletes I knew, until I met Calyph. In high school, when the world's full of them, they're the worst sort. The small, angry men coaching them, hoarsely shouting, presiding over their buzz-cut dictatorship, giving facile, self-serving lectures on what it means to be men; the pimply boys harnessed and made to run suicides; the hazing and the bullying. That was sport as I'd known it, sport like the lowest rung of some runt military, a humiliating way of getting fit and aligned into cannon fodder, as a substitute for anybody doing anything strategic or sophisticated.

But with the pros, you feel different—and you hear everything about the pros. Their grades have always been fixed, they name their children after themselves and then squander their inheritance. They go to clubs in every city after the games and take special rooms. You hear how they come home to their girlfriends and get into fights, drag somebody down a flight of stairs. But Calyph wasn't a bit like that. He had such an attitude of moral uprightness it gave me a pain. If he ever hit a woman in rage, it must've been because the pitch of their argument had risen so high that to make a hole in the wall behind her would've been just a cheap show and a diversion.

I drove up to the gates and put in the passcode, which remained unchanged with the new order. As the gate-halves pulled apart, the mist that clung to them ran off into rivulets. Approaching the house, the Mazda moved from the blacktop onto the gravel, and where I once heard that timeless hushing it now sounded like someone was viciously shaking a coffee can full of rocks beneath the car.

I put the car in the garage and took the Jaguar out and waited by the passenger door. It was just seven-thirty. I wondered where we would go today.

Looking up at the house, I saw motion from an upper window, as if a curtain had been brushed aside. In another moment I heard the noise of a motor behind me. It was a cab, not one of the suburban companies but a regular city cab. It came around the circle, crunching the stone, and pulled up on the far side of me. I looked for a passenger, but there was only a peaceful-looking Middle Eastern man behind the glass, staring straight ahead with a bored smile.

I stepped toward him and he rolled down the window a little, the smell of leather and the city leaking out.

“Who're you here for?”

He consulted the cab's ancient electronics. “Ramses,” he said in a distinct voice.

“He's not here,” I said.

“Okay, man, but they buzz me in.”

“He's not here,” I said again.

He smiled at me, shrugging helplessly, and then I heard the front door open.

“That's for me,” a woman's voice lisped.

She stood on the top step, frowning beneath a pair of overlarge sunglasses. I had the idea she didn't want to give up the high ground. She wore a simple black tee and a pair of green sweatpants, as though she might just now be embarking on a run, but for a pair of canvas slippers. Her “broken” finger was all healed, and a large rectangular bandage now protruded from beneath her sleeve.

“Ramses,” the cabbie said serenely.

At the sound of what might still have been her future name, Odette skipped quickly down the steps. I remember looking down, marking the progress of her tiny plump toes half-protruding from the slipped-on shoes.

“I don't propose to speak with you,” she said.

I glanced up and she was blushing as she went by. I turned to the cab, meaning to direct something demeaning about her to the driver, but could think of nothing sufficiently cruel. The glass had gone up again.

“Congratulations on your engagement,” I murmured.

“My what?” she cried angrily, yanking open the door of the cab.

I let her go and walked toward the house. All my limbs felt heavy. My head was light as an empty rind.

There was a single light on up the stairs, but the first floor was all dim. In the early sun it seemed almost cloudy inside—I got the feeling of wandering through slightly misty rooms. I wanted to go right up and confront him, to denounce him impressively, but I wasn't sure how to start. I wasn't the confrontational sort; I was afraid I'd be no good. I could see myself inarticulately aping the tense atmosphere of a bad film, a figure of no consequence, being turned lightly aside.

Instead I wandered through the rooms. I went to the cold hearth and looked in at the ashes. I picked up the poker and carried it around with me—it was soothing to hold something iron. In the hallway I looked at his Ninth Ward picture of the men on the stoop of the ruined house. It seemed a sort of pose now, to have that, to claim that special rage. Not all black guys got to be from New Orleans. I hadn't heard about his going down and helping. None of his were among the abandoned. I spat upon the picture and watched my thin spittle run down the gloss.

I wandered on to the living room and the suit of armor. I'd spent some idle time wondering about the period of the suit—it wasn't the heavy plate of classic knight armor, but it wasn't some light Bantu stuff, either. The torso was black, with a sort of supple Samurai look, the arms and legs of silver scale. A disc shield sat at its base, next to a freestanding spear with an intricate, curved tip. I touched the spear with the poker and then threw the poker aside. It fell to the carpet soundlessly.

The spear was an awkward thing, standing up to my shoulder. It seemed too heavy to throw but too light to do much else with. Using it like a walking stick, I paced across the room and came once more to the base of the stairs. I stood there a long moment, trying to gather myself, my mind empty, clutching at last the emptiness itself, and then I lifted the spear and jabbed hard with the butt at the wooden ball at the banister's end. It popped off cleanly and clattered down the hall. I looked up at the stairs, at all the white carpet between him and me, and felt my legs swollen with the heavy feeling of a coming cramp.

The bedroom door was open and he was lying on the bed. His back was to me, the twisted sheets wrapped tight around him from neck to toe. He was still. I walked to the foot of the bed, but I had a fear of going all the way, of seeing his face, in case he wasn't asleep but only tensed, waiting for me, his staring eyes gleaming out at nothing. I prodded him softly on the foot with the butt of the spear.

He writhed a little and moaned a distant complaint from within his sleep. I saw the muscle of his shoulder and the curiously skimpy hair of his armpit. He propped a new pillow over his eyes and curled in on himself like a protesting child.

I prodded him a second time and got no response. I swung the spear around.

I didn't poke him, it was just a tap, but he sat right up at last. In one motion both pillows were behind him and he was sitting up in bed as if prepared to take a coffee. His chest was hairless like a boy's.

He blinked at me. He seemed to be considering a serious but distant problem. “We got a beef here?” he asked finally.

“Yes,” I said.

He nodded, eyeing the spear-tip slowly, as if to let me know he was taking it in, and though he trusted me fully and bore no suspicions of my having anything but the best intentions, it was being accounted for as a weapon.

“Get up,” I said. “You're late for your appointment.”

“What's the time?”

“Get up.”

“You wanna toss me them clothes then?” I saw some folded stuff on a chair in the corner.

“You can dress yourself,” I said.

He shrugged, and then I saw his arms flex and he hauled himself out of bed all at once, in a rush, making a strong gesture of it. He was all naked. I didn't want to see that, not at all. He was small and shrunken, but the way he stood, his hips directed toward me, it was like he figured I was motivated by some fetish. I saw myself as a petty torturer, making men show themselves to me, and felt the spear go loose in my hand.

“The sheet,” I said, too loudly. He took his time dragging it loose. At last he wrapped himself and limped to the clothes. He picked them up in one hand, holding the sheet to his stomach, and then he paused.

“I'm not sure how we do this,” he said. “Unless you wanna see some more.” He cracked a punishing, too-comfortable smile.

“I'll turn around,” I heard myself say.

He looked at me silently; the idea seemed to have thrown him. Although the spear was just something I happened to have, a kind of benign suggestion, I thought he must've still had some idea of disarming me. I stood in the corner of the room with my face to the wall and dared him to. I figured it was against his code, if my back was turned—and soon he was dressed. I turned back and he was wearing a T-shirt and track pants.

“Not like that,” I said. “You want something nice for today, sir.”

“It's just a checkup on the . . .” But he left himself unfinished.

“You never know where we might go,” I said brightly. “A well-dressed man is prepared for anything.”

Reluctantly he stripped down to his boxers. Once again I turned my face away, and although my nerves were near paralysis in confusion and dread, I whistled a happy tune. At last we stood in front of his closet, the master and valet, and chose him an outfit for the day.

His closet was a good one, and deep. I was surprised at its neatness and arrangement. Everything hung in rows from dark to light, and the swath of blacks separated solid and striped. Only the shoes were haphazard, covering the floor unpaired and upended, like a harbor full of boating accidents. His suits were mostly all business: they agreed with the team's faceless aesthetic, but seemed to be held together by a classical sensibility. There were shoehorns and a collection of pocket handkerchiefs. There was a suit the color of honey butter that I imagined being worn poolside at a British country estate, while women in austere swimsuits came lightly across the lawn, nonplussing the butler by carrying their own towels. He saw me looking and reached for it.

“Not that,” I said. “Where's your draft suit?”

I started leafing through the back row, looking for some kind of loud embarrassment. I figured his racks would hold at least a couple suits like the ones you see on draft night, the garish payday eyesores the more flamboyant lottery picks wear, in turquoise or cherry red, celebratory and regrettable as so many neon cocktails.

“This here,” he said. He pulled out a light-gray suit so conservative it looked like some ticker tape might slip out of the pocket. I imagined Antonia's father nodding in approval and offering Calyph his first Rolex as a reward for not embarrassing his future family on television.

“Very nice,” I said. “But let's find something the ladies might like a bit more. You never know when a nice juicy, loose one might go by.”