Rules for Becoming a Legend (31 page)

“Were you running? From Mom? 'Cause she was pregnant?”

Todd tilts his head. How can he answer this? He was scared, sure. He was just a kid. Can he even remember how he was feeling that far back? He wasn't running from Genny, nope, he's almost sure of that. Even if he
had
been running from Genny at the time, it wouldn't have stuck. No way it would have lasted. “No, Jimmy, that's not what it was.”

He sees his son swallow, getting ready to say something. “Pops, I want to get my GED. Go to college early.”

He chuckles—relief—and stands up too. Rubs his eyes. “I don't think it works that way, kiddo. The NCAA is tough. You got to be a certain age for playing basketball. You can't just jump to college and play early. There are rules. I know this new league will be easy and all, but you got to wait. You're only a junior.”

His son stares at him for a long, hard time. The thing about Chuck's dream is that Todd would rather die once than twice. Finally he gets what Jimmy is saying and has to look away from his son. Not playing ball—that's the whole point.

Spring and Fall, 2007

JIMMY KIRKUS, SIXTEEN YEARS OLD—SEVEN MONTHS UNTIL THE WALL.

T
he Fishermen team bus had tooled by the wreck at two miles an hour. Jimmy had done what the rest of the kids did. He looked, he pointed, he said, “Shit,” and then he got back to the business of going too far with a girl. He hated himself for it but who could blame the kid? How the hell was he supposed to know what he was seeing? He didn't recognize the car. It was McMahan's after all. It never crossed his mind that maybe . . .

When he did find out, Jimmy didn't go back to school or the team. One night, he snuck out and threw a rock through Naomi's window. Then he sat in the bushes and watched her father patch the hole with cardboard. He listened to her crying. He waited there, his breath visible in puffs, until the coldness had infiltrated the deepest part of him.

•   •   •

From home he caught on to a rumor going through town that everyone knew but no one would tell Jimmy. That's what rumors are, after all, secrets kept from only one person. He'd heard a part of this rumor from a neighbor lady talking overloud on the phone with her window open. Finally, one day, he cornered Pedro behind the gym, sniffing deeply of a sandwich bag full of crumbly green.

“Pedro,” Jimmy said.

Glassy-eyed and slack-faced, Pedro literally jumped at Jimmy's voice. “Jesus and Mary, my man,” he said, barely able to get the words past his relief, giggling, his ragged draws of breath. “What. What you doing here? You don't go to school.”

“I came to find you.”

“Yo. Check it, Jimmy, check it,” Pedro poked around in his plastic bag and came away with a small lump pinched between index and thumb. “This is a nugget.” Pedro stuck it near his flared nostrils and sniffed so hard, Jimmy was afraid he'd suck it up. “Look at this, Jimmy, it's like a little corn on the cob. I just want to put some butter on it and nibble.”

Jimmy leaned in. Uncomfortable but feeling he had to play along. “That's big?” he asked. To him it looked like a cat turd.

“Hell yeah.” Pedro pinched off a little into his palm, peppered it into the opened corpse of an eviscerated cigarette, and set to work twisting it back up with some new paper. Produced a little splif that looked like it had aged in the cracks of a public bus seat. Despite all evidence to the contrary, Pedro apparently wasn't high enough. Clicked the lighter. Lit it up.

“Stinks,” Jimmy said.

“Yeah, well. Smells good to me, so?” Licked the end of the joint tenderly. Inhaled again. “You know, you should really try this shit, man.” His voice got squished tiny, all the smoke crowded around it. “I mean, seriously, they've done some studies and shit. Medicinal as hell. Works for, you know, depression.”

“I'm not depressed.”

“Whatever, man, you're not in school anymore, so.” Jimmy turned away but Pedro crab-walked around so he stayed in his line of sight. “Listen, you ever think about what Dex was thinking just before he—”

“No.”

“—died? I do. All the time.” Another toke, his voice squished up again. “It's like, what the hell could he been possibly thinking in that little bitsy space of time? But, he was thinking something. And it's like, I don't believe in God as like a rule, but when I get thinking about what Dex was thinking, then I'm thinking damn, I hope there is a dog.” Pause. Full stop. Then Pedro laughed frenziedly. “I mean
God
, not
dog . . .”
He laughed till it was unwound. Then in a whisper, “But holy
shit
, what if God
is
a dog?”

The truth was, Jimmy almost constantly thought about what Dex had been thinking, feeling, just before. It was all he could do to keep it
out
of his mind.

“Pedro, what's going around about my moms, and that doctor, huh?”

Pedro waved him off, the little joint splashing out ash. “Naw, you don't want to know. Bad energy. Bad juju!” He started laughing again, more coughing.

Jimmy slapped the joint out of his hand. It sizzled in a puddle. “Just tell me.”

“Little Jimmy making a big stink. You want to fight again, cabrón? That was good weed.”

“Just tell me.”

“Your mom was fucking the good doctor, that enough for you?”

•   •   •

His pops understood about him dropping school and basketball. Even supported the choice. Seemed to him that fate for the Kirkus family was to get everything ripped away and then some. The Kirkus Curse. His pops educated Jimmy at home for the rest of the year. Taught him best he could from a curriculum he ordered over the phone from a lady with a Texan accent, hoping his son would forgive him one day for any gaps in his education.

•   •   •

The Flying Finn never came back after the funeral for Dex and Genny Mori. He had been mumbling something about catching up on training when he rode off on his bike. Suit coat flapping. No one bothered looking for him. It wasn't the first time the man had disappeared.

•   •   •

Jimmy stayed in gym shorts and sweatshirts day in, day out. Slept whenever he could. Thought about his brother dying so young, about his mom sleeping with some doctor from Seaside. His whole life she'd felt apart from him. Like it was a
favor
that she gave birth to him, nothing more. She pushed him away and yet died fucking some stranger. It was a bile-laced rage he felt toward her, made all the more acidic by the fact that he would never be able to call her out on it.

Day in and day out he felt himself sinking into a depression that was big and black and without a bottom. He felt as though each day was dragging him nearer to the edge and at any moment he could go over. And that would be a relief. But the edge always moved farther off. There was always a lower way to feel. He didn't touch a basketball. He ate, he slept, and he studied with his pops.

And, oh yes, he grew.

Grew huge. Enormous. A tree among grasses. A lion among cats. A Big-Gulp among eight-ounce cans. Wide like Dex but taller and quicker still. Those damn Kirkus genes. Late to the party, but ready to party nonetheless.

Then, finally, seven months into this self-exile, his pops couldn't take it anymore. Couldn't bear to see his son drifting so much. Remembered about the pain he felt walking away from basketball and not looking back. All that trouble, and for what? He tried something he thought drastic. He told the kid, “I hear basketball's
starting up. You could go shoot around. Just go check out a practice. Just because. Just to see. You're set to go back to school tomorrow anyway. And. Well. Dex would have wanted you to. I mean, can't just stay inside all day every day for the rest of your life, right?”

So Jimmy went.

Just to check it out.

Sunday, March 9, 2008

JIMMY KIRKUS, SIXTEEN YEARS OLD—EIGHTY-THREE DAYS AFTER THE WALL.

T
he rains have been on for two days straight. Jimmy's brought Columbia City their first championship in years and yet the town is threatening to slough off into the river. With good comes bad. Gray streaks across the atmosphere muddling everything the same color. Rumors are lighting through town that the Coast Guard could be called in soon to evacuate. Those alive who remember the 1938 flood prophesy doom. The rivers on both sides, Youngs and Columbia, are hopped up on rain and wind, giddy to take a stumble through town, pop off parked cars and houses like a drunk does trash cans on his walk home from the bar. Clouds that start in the sky don't end until they're hovering over mailboxes.

Jimmy, his pops, and the Flying Finn sit in the living room and watch the downpour. Power's been out, so they just talk—or not. The phone's been ringing off the hook and cars honk wildly as they drive slowly past, wading through the torrent of rain water washing down Glasgow Street. Sometimes the cars stop in front of the Kirkus house and people fire bottle rockets from the windows to explode damply in the gray air. They call out, shake their fists in pride, and blow off-key blasts from cardboard party trumpets—
charge!
Jimmy “Kamikaze” Kirkus is the toast of the town.

There was to be a party at Tapiola Park for all of Columbia City to celebrate the state title—bonfire and a band, hundreds of hotdogs and generic-brand pop—but this is canceled due to the
weather. Twenty or so people still show up. They end up dancing in the mud, drinking straight from bottles poorly hidden in paper sacks that melt away in the rain. The cops come to break it up a couple hours later. Find a handful of men and women drunk, in various states of undress, shivering and singing bits of the high school's song: “Hail to thee our alma mater . . .”

The rain doesn't quit until it's fed Youngs River and her evil big brother the Columbia strong enough to swell up, swallow the high school and the Brick House too. Trees fall all over Peter Pan Court, and Tapiola Court simply disappears beneath the tongue of the river water. Cats are found on roofs, dogs don't stop barking, and some jokester has vandalized the sign on the edge of town so it says,
WELCOME TO COLUMBIA CITY LAKE
.
The Kirkus house, on a hill, is spared, but there is a fear that its feet will be swept from beneath it. The sidewalk a rushing river. What a strange phenomenon. When Jimmy looks out his front window and sees all that moving water he feels as if he too is drifting.

Just three miles outside of town the clouds thin, the rain slackens, but here in town everything is veiled, drenched. As if Columbia City has finally grabbed a piece of the squirrely heavens and won't let go. She holds the clouds close to her chest and damn the rains.

On the fifth straight day of rain, school cancelled, the cabin fever is too much, and Jimmy wades out into the freezing water in enormous yellow boots his pops once bought thinking he might take up clamming. He takes his old basketball and makes his careful way down to the high school. He finds a canoe abandoned, stuck, and choking in a swing set at Tapiola Park. He bails out the water the best he can with his stocking cap. He's soaked now, shivering. He paddles on the shallow water the rest of the way to school. Surreal to glide over sidewalks and clogged storm drains. The splashing rain hitting the churned-up water is so constant in
its roar it becomes an off-brand of silence. If he doesn't turn and paddles straight ahead, he would be in the Pacific Ocean before long and who knows how many days it would take to find him—catch on to a good current and be a hundred miles out before night—but he does turn in the end.

When he gets to the gym, the doors to the Brick House stand open. He has his battered, gray basketball with him, almost black with wetness. He paddles in. Each splash of his paddle echoes in this giant cave. The gym is gloomy, dim, also without power. It means there is no security camera to catch his private moment this time. The
EXIT
sign somehow still shines on.

He ties the canoe to the bleachers and wades into Coach Kelly's office. It's a bathtub and some of his framed pictures, old trophies, and yearbooks are toys. There, still dry on Coach Kelly's desk, is his medal. 6A Boys Basketball State Champions. He picks it up; it's cold, and heavier than he thought it would be. On the bus ride home some of the other guys had been kissing their medals, grinning with them, wearing them into pit stop gas stations, waiting to be noticed. He hadn't wanted his. Told Coach to hold on to it for a while. Now. Here. This is it. Jimmy puts it on. It taps on his chest. He thought it would be different than this. More. He feels claustrophobic and needs to leave the office. Back into the gym glowing red from the
EXIT
light.

He gets back into his canoe and the light guides him well enough to get to the spot on the wall he stained. To the exact place he smashed his head. The red and undulating water cast a wobble over everything. He touches the wall with an open palm. He breathes in. It's still here. His blood. The blood-red bricks of Kamikaze Kirkus. Already the canoe is drifting. A longer reach to touch these bricks. He takes the medal off his neck. Drops it into the water. Then, in the next moment, he tips his old basketball overboard. It rotates so he sees the last name he wrote on it.
Blacker, thicker than the rest. Three letters. D-E-X. It drifts slowly away, spinning, the name of his brother dunked; this time it will not come back.

Soon the rain will stop, soon the town will rebuild, but they will do so proudly. They were founded on the fur trade, built up by canning, and both have left them, but they don't stumble. They've had two fires, and two floods, and still they survive. “Is this it?” they will ask the sky. “This is all you got?” For their town is home to a champion once again—a legend.

Jimmy Kirkus unties the canoe and paddles back out into Columbia City.