Rules for Becoming a Legend (2 page)

Friday, December 20, 1985

JIMMY KIRKUS NOT YET BORN—TWENTY-TWO YEARS UNTIL THE WALL.

T
odd Kirkus drove Genny Mori way out to Area C on the jetty and parked. They were young and it was a Friday. Out here, past areas A and B, they had privacy—and the starry sky. This far down the alphabet the beach was too hard-chewed by the Pacific to get any tourists outside the occasional treasure-hunter. And at night? May as well been Todd's bedroom. The stars, meanwhile, were the excuse. It was how he got all his girls to come out here with him. “You've got to see the stars from the jetty. They're beautiful. It's like that swirly painting by the guy who lost his ear? You know.”

After he parked, he climbed into the back of the minivan. “Check it out,” he said. He clicked the rear seats down until they were flat and he stared up at his personal sliver of sky through the rear window.

Genny Mori was a notorious prude and stayed in the front, but Todd was wearing her down, as he was known to do. “I know this trick,” she said.

“Oh come on, I just want to show you the stars.” The line came easy. It was well used. “More space than you'd think back here, Genny-baby.” And it really was big back there, and charming in a way, to be so warm and cozy with winter's ocean so close.

“I can see the stars fine from here,” she said, though Todd knew it was a lie. To see anything from the front seat, she'd have to lean uncomfortably over the dashboard and then crane her head up.

“Genny-honey, come on.” Todd was whining, but he liked her reluctance—the one girl in school who hadn't come easy. Bravely he pressed on. This was their fifth date. Usually by this point Todd knew his girlfriend's favorite positions and was plotting his exit strategy—so goes life for a high school basketball star in Columbia City. With Genny though, all he'd got was enough heavy petting to start a campfire.

Todd also liked that she looked different than everyone else. A full-blooded Japanese and simultaneously the hottest and strangest thing in town. Hot because she was a dusty, dark-eyed girl blessed with full lips and a sound little shelf of an ass perfect for eyes and hands to rest on. Strange because the Mori family, aside from the random Mexicans who worked their way through for fruit-picking season, was the one little splash of color in the Scandinavia-white gene pool of Columbia City. No, scratch “little splash,” more like cannon ball.

Then there was the fact that she only had her mom around. A bond because he only had his dad. It was a connection that seemed obvious and trite on paper but meaningful in real life. He didn't flinch with Genny while talking about his home life like he did with the others. She knew the language, her own experience rhymed with it.

Todd heard Genny Mori blow out air and knew she was clearing her bangs from her eyes. It was a habit he'd learned to love in her. So cute. She started climbing back. “This van's gross.”

He helped her crawl over him to the space at his side and squeezed her ass on the way. She slapped his hand for it, which caused her to lose balance and tumble face-first into those utilitarian seats. She squealed.

“Uh, I think there's something wet back here,” she said.

Todd knew his van was gross. It had been a place of countless
hookups, impromptu lunchtime parties, and was a moldering mobile gym locker to boot. He spent all his time in that squeaky gray van because it was the one place his father, a man everyone knew as the Flying Finn, wouldn't come.

“I'll get something nicer when I hit the big times,” he told her.

So there it was, and he had been the one to say it. Everyone knew Todd was going to star in the NBA someday. He was that good at basketball.

“What car will you get?” Genny was on her side, looking at him, and he could tell she was trying to keep something out of her voice. Her breath was hot with the rum he'd brought them.

Todd traced her calves with his fingertips, all the way up to that gorgeous ass. “Something hot,” he said. “Mercedes, or Porsche.”

A pause filled the close air between them and Todd wondered what she made of him. Everyone in this small town had an opinion and he was almost scared to hear hers. Maybe she was one of these girls who were frightened of him. Thinks he's all bang, bang, boom, on to the next one. She wouldn't be exactly wrong to think this—his reputation for getting with girls was exaggerated, but only slightly—but she also wouldn't be exactly right. Worse, she could be one of those chicks looking to hitch a ride. Willing to roll around with him as long as it got them somewhere. His father was always warning about girls spreading their legs to become part of the target. Todd was in the position of not being able to reassure Genny if she was the first type of girl, and being entirely uninterested in her—beyond the night—if she was the second.

Then, as if she could read his mind, in a voice so soft it tickled him, “I didn't believe that letter to the editor about you.” Here it was—what she thought of him. “It isn't true. You're good for the team.”

She was talking about the anonymous letter that had appeared in the
Columbia City Standard
. The headline ran,
Could Freight
Train Derail Fishermen Basketball?
, and it had become this burrowing worm in Todd's thoughts ever since it was published back in November. Hadn't he already brought the Fishermen a state title as a junior? Wasn't he leading them to a second? If he ever found out who wrote it, there would be pieces of that unfortunate man all over town.

“Thanks. It's bullshit, you know?” Todd said, anger rising just talking about it.

“I never did believe it,” she said.

He let out a breath, settled. “Why do you like me, Genny?”

“I never said I did.”

“You're funny.”

And he was on her, and they were going. She was a river, her mouth, her tongue, and it was all rushing into him with drunken fury. Todd was surprised to feel her move in enthusiastic, if not expert ways, to have her take a certain amount of control. It was like nothing he'd had with her before—worlds different from the tedious stroking she'd reluctantly given him up until then. It thrilled him, pushed him on. Naked and without a condom—because Todd never guessed it would actually happen with Genny Mori, not so soon—he stopped, poised on the edge.

Then Genny Mori said, “OK, just this once. But pull out?” A permission they would both look back on, sometimes, as a mistake.

A memory flashed into Todd's head. Fifth grade. Genny Mori in pigtails running to her father's car. It was raining and there were puddles everywhere. Mr. Mori—the town's dentist for the short while he stuck around—was shouting something to her in Japanese and she was ignoring him. Little Genny avoided every single puddle along the way. Her father yelled louder and still she gave him no mind. Todd imagined he was telling her to hurry up, and so she was taking her time instead. Skirting every puddle instead
of jumping them, or stomping through. Rebelling. She had seemed so brave to Todd. Brave and sad. He wouldn't have been able to stand up to the Flying Finn like that.

Damn
, Todd thought, losing steam in the present as he got lost in the past,
get it done now or it's not going to get done.
So he pushed in. Then it happened quicker and bigger than Todd thought it could, and he told her, shivering, “Well shit.”

And she said, “That's OK, Todd.”

So Todd said, “OK, baby,” and he pulled her closer and held her long enough to feel the warm wet turn cold. He held her even when he wanted to stop just because of the way she said “That's OK, Todd.” And really in that moment it all seemed just fine because he knew she thought she loved him, and he thought it might be OK because he could do whatever he wanted back then, even fall in love with this girl. Everyone from Seattle to San Francisco knew who he was. Scholarship offers, shit, those were a dime a dozen. Todd was NBA-bound and everyone knew it. He was bigger than U2. At least in that little green-and-blue patchwork quilt sewed with the seamless stitching of fog and rain we call the Pacific Northwest he was. Goddamn. Besides, who ever got pregnant from one time?

This was Jimmy's father as a young man: basketball stud, biggest thing to hit town since Fred Meyer's department store, and always headed for bigger, better things.

A month and a half later Todd Kirkus and the rest of the team rolled south on a yellow bus done up in streamers and washable paint. It had been a good season for Todd; he'd led the Fishermen to an 18-1 record heading into the playoffs. There was greatness in the air and Columbia City decamped to Eugene to witness their beloved Todd “Freight Train” Kirkus win his second state title and cement himself as the greatest Fisherman to play the game—even the legendary Tall Firs had only won one in high school, and
had needed four great players to get it. Added to this was the heady assurance that Todd was bound for fame and riches. He was the top recruit in the country, famous coaches called him by first name, and it didn't seem too big a leap to imagine him endorsing sneakers one day. Native son done good? Naw, native son done gold.

On the bus ride south, Coach Kelly got teary-eyed as he addressed the team, standing in the aisle, holding the leather bench seats for support. “A big couple of days coming up, and—” He coughed. Paused, looked out the window.

“Hold it together, Coach,” Todd called out. “Can't have you crying in McArthur Court, that's for the girls.”

Coach smiled, looked down the length of the bus, let the laughter from Todd's joke roll off his back, and then continued. “Be sure to call it The Pit, boys.” Coach Kelly's eyes sparkled in reverence of the University of Oregon basketball arena. “Always call it The Pit because, because—”

And Todd interrupted him by starting the team on the unofficial cheer, not letting Coach Kelly find his thought:
Three cheers for Columbia City High, you bring the whiskey, I'll bring the rye . . .
and on and on.

In the early rounds of the tournament Todd was as unstoppable as, well, a freight train. He got his shots in, clean and true; and when the defenses collapsed, he kicked it out to James Berg, a small, wily guard with a knockdown shot who only ever smiled when Todd pointed his way, slapped his back, gave him a high five.

James Berg was Todd's best—only—friend on that team where the other players were disgusted by his cockiness. The way he held up his hand after making a shot, bantered with the refs like it was all child's play, spoke of himself in the third person during postgame interviews and found scouts in the stands to nod at after
big plays. James somehow saw through it to the funny, kind kid he met at the community pool one summer when they were both in third grade. They'd debated which trucks—Dodge or Ford—were the best. This alliance despite—or maybe because of—the bad blood between their fathers that had boiled up back when the Flying Finn had inexplicably beaten Berg for a position on the City Council.

Todd and James going against their overbearing fathers by being friends was a sweet, early helping of revolt. James had been at Todd's side ever since.

•   •   •

The wins in the early rounds came so easy, Todd usually sat out the second half, scanning the crowd for Genny and giving her looks. After games there would be a team meal and then he'd sit in the hotel pool, feeling weightless. Then, after curfew, he'd slip the assistant coach in charge of keeping watch and go out the service door. It was three parking lots, no roads, hurdling the hedges and crouching behind cars, until Tall Pines Motel—the place Genny was staying with her friend, Bonnie. Two twin beds. Todd and Genny on one, a pissed-off Bonnie on the other.

“Seriously, keep it clean,” Bonnie would always say.

“I'm a gentleman, Bonnie. Always a gentleman.” Then lights off and he'd squeeze Genny close, butt to pelvis, back to chest. Hands clasped on her belly. After a while he'd trace a fingertip down her side, around her butt, into the space between the legs. It tickled her, and he liked it when she squirmed. He'd be growing bigger by then, and do nothing to hide it. Then it was all starts and stops, whispering, “Do you think she's awake?”

Todd couldn't sleep with another person on a bed so small. By the time the very first rays of light were escaping the dark womb of night, he would be gone, closing the door softly behind him, back to the hotel room he shared with James in a string of rooms
taken up by the Fishermen team. Walking upright and proud along the road—too early for anyone to see him and get him in trouble.

Then another team breakfast, another soak in the pool, and his father taking him out for lunch.

“You know who call me last night,” the old man whispered across the diner table. “Larry Brown!” He looked around to see if anyone was listening, like this was a state secret. In an even lower voice, comical and growly, lacing his plate of half-finished home fries with white spit, “the coach for the New Jersey Nets!”

This kind of talk from his father sank Todd and his appetite. A man who could polish off whole herds of cattle at a single sitting, he only managed a few mouthfuls when with the Flying Finn.

“Well, we got a lot of offers from colleges too, old man,” Todd told him.

“Let me asks the question.” The Flying Finn held his fork up, as if the tines were the irrefutable proof to what he was about to say. “They
pay
you for the basketball in college? No, they pay nothing!”

Then it was back with the team for a pregame meeting, and later, off to The Pit for a game with whoever the Fishermen were going to roll on that night. Then the cycle would start all over. Four rounds of playoffs knocked back in a line, one after the other, and it made the fans, even seeping out into the general public, giddy drunk on the historical dominance they were seeing from Todd Kirkus and the Columbia City Fighting Fishermen.