Rules for Becoming a Legend (4 page)

“Well, damn.” Still looking into his big, useless hands. “When it rains, it—”

“Oh, Todd!” She hugged him and wished she could play it off as a joke. But who jokes like that?

•   •   •

Todd hugged Genny Mori, latest in a long line of girls he'd dated in Columbia City, and for some reason patted the back of her head. Where did this leave him? Suspended from the team for his final high school game and suddenly stuck to make good with a girl he was kinda seeing. Like those cells balled up in her belly were some kind of magnet whose only opposite in the whole world was him.

She was weeping harder and he just kept on patting the back of her head. He wasn't even at the point of not knowing what to say—so shocked, he didn't even know he was supposed to say something in the first place.

James turned away, kicked something that was maybe on the
ground, ran his hand through his hair. “Jesus,” he said. “This is fucking. I mean, Jesus.”

“What's your problem?” Bonnie asked. She snapped wide the mouth of her purse and rooted around: a pack of cigarettes. She shook one loose, lit up.

“Hey, what the hell?” Todd said. Here was something. He pulled away from Genny, took a step.

“What?” Bonnie squinted at him.

“You know what. She's pregnant.”

Bonnie laughed. Three bleats in a row. A terrible laugh and the main reason Todd had never flexed on her. That and a big nose. He assumed kissing would be a puzzle with a nose that big—one he didn't want to figure out.

“Come on, Todd,” she said. “She's not
that
pregnant.”

Todd looked back and saw Bonnie was right. Genny stood there, belly flat, body stacked, still hot. There was nothing in her appearance that foretold of the stretching, the swelling, and the ripping that would come. “Still,” he said, quieter.

“Todd, it's OK.” Genny put a hand on his elbow, tugging at it. Maybe she needed to wet his other shoulder now.

“It's OK? No, it's not OK.” He backed off a step. “None of this is OK, OK?”

“He's kind of an asshole, so it's weird, because he's also kind of right,” Bonnie took a deep inhale and let twin jets of smoke blast from her formidable nostrils.

“He's not an asshole.” James stood up, came over to Todd's side. “He's not the one who's pregnant.”

“That doesn't even make sense, idiot.”

“Hey, screw you.”

Genny started weeping again so everyone stopped talking.

“Genny?” Todd asked, big numb paw halfway to her shoulder.

“I'm just tired. That's all.” She sniffed, ran her hand under her
nose. “Bonnie, let's go. I just need to lay down, that's the only thing.”

•   •   •

Last night he'd left Genny and Bonnie's room at the Tall Pines earlier than normal. Back at the team hotel he found the Flying Finn still awake in the lobby. Sitting in one of the ugly green chairs, staring into space.

“You know the money they make in NBA?” the old man had asked.

“Dad,” Todd said, wondering if his father was going to try and punish him for sneaking out, tamping down the blush of anger he felt at being pushed, again, in a direction he wasn't sure he wanted to go.

“Much money!” the Flying Finn said, too loud for the small lobby, for the late hour. “I will move to New Jersey too! It is pretty! A garden state! I will help! We have waited so long for this. It doesn't matter about championship game.”

And that was the start of it. Old man wasn't concerned with punishing Todd for having snuck out; gangly dude might as well have had dollar signs floating in his eyeballs like a cartoon villain. Todd exploded, shouted right back. All those years of him trying to breathe the same air, sweat the same sweat. As if this were his struggle too. It escalated, and then dipped, and then escalated again. The front desk attendant trying to tamp it down. Making ludicrous shushing sounds like that could have the slightest effect. Ended in a bang.

“No son of mine,” the Flying Finn warbled in a stripped down voice. “No son of mine. You walk away from a better life? No son of mine.”

And Todd coming back, purposely cussing because he knew how it grinded his father. “It's
my
fucking life!” And then out, hands in the air, out.

Under the breezeway, storming, looking for a wrecking, Todd came across one of the cleaning-lady carts, bejeweled in its lower deck with small bottles of hard alcohol. Gin and vodka. He stuffed his pockets. Gone, out, bye to everything, everybody.

And in the morning after, hangover pounding, the realization that he was suspended, it had seemed like the worst thing. But it wasn't. There was a baby he had made now growing in Genny Mori. Genny Mori. A Japanese girl. Pretty, nice, tough in a way he loved, but still not who he'd ever pictured himself with when he pictured a future of playing in the NBA. A kid? It felt like the heaviest thing that could happen to him. He wanted to be away, suddenly—far away.

“I mean, what the hell am I supposed to do with that?” he asked James, the girls now gone in Bonnie's rig. “If she's pregnant, I mean, really pregnant, then what am I supposed to do with that?” They walked through campus. It was a clear winter day and bundled students with high-hitched backpacks walked to class or lingered in groups around benches and stairs. A crispness so sharp it brought tears. Old brick buildings on all sides, confident, academic.

“You think she's going to keep it?” James asked.

“How should I know?”

James coughed, said in a quieter voice, “Well, you know she will, don't you?”

“No,” Todd said, anger quick-triggered at having to repeat himself. “Like I just said, how the hell should I know?”

James stopped walking and so Todd stopped too. He followed his friend a little ways off the path, under a big oak tree. “Listen,” James whispered. “You know she'll keep it 'cause with a baby, here's the thing, with a baby she's got you, right? Anyplace you get to, she'll still have you. You make a million in the pros, she's still
got you and she's got half that money too. That's why she's keeping it, guarantee.”

Todd slapped the trunk of the tree. Every layer revealed confined him more.

•   •   •

So things sped up and didn't matter and mattered more than ever all at once. Didn't matter that the Fishermen won the title without Todd anyway, Freight Train watching from the stands, but it did matter how—on a last second shot by little James Berg, who was then carried off the floor. Didn't matter that Todd's teammates avoided him after the game, but it did matter that he became convinced it was James who'd told on him for drinking because of the way he hugged his father after the final buzzer sounded—Principal Berg—the old man seeming to comfort James, reassure James, rather than celebrate with him.

Didn't matter that later Todd sat alone in the parked van, keys dangling in the ignition, and drowned himself in mini-fridge shooters for the second night running while the Flying Finn fitfully slept up in the room. But Todd's plan did matter: to go.

He needed the sharp infusion only an open window and a speeding car could give. The team didn't need him, his best friend had turned on him, but now this girl did? Genny Mori. Dating for less than two months. It wasn't right or fair. He was never coming back. Gone, gone, gone. One after the next he killed the screw-top bottles, tossing the little bodies on the van's floor. Todd got soaked and then slammed the steering wheel, honked the horn. He groped in his pockets, pushing back against the seat, looking for the keys before he realized they were already in the ignition and so he slammed the steering wheel again, he started her up, stomped the gas. The engine leapt to it but he still had it in park.

Then he saw someone walking through the parking lot, hood
up. James Berg, conquering hero. Todd opened the door and stumbled out sideways, engine still running. He regained balance and turned to James. “You're a fucking champion, my
friend
.” Then he charged, swinging wildly as he went.

James stepped neatly to the side, gave him a hard push in the back. Todd fell hard, rolled once, and then lay still, breathing.

“Genny's looking for you,” James said.

Todd didn't answer. It was after two a.m. and the world was an empty place colored with the yellow of parking lot lights. There was the noise of traffic from I-5, half a mile away. Then, closer, sirens.

“Let's go, Todd. You can't get caught drinking again.” He sounded tired, and that galled Todd. All he'd done was play a basketball game. Why the hell should he be tired?

Cops coming and Todd had to run. Pregnant girl, disappointment, it all felt like symptoms of place, and he could remedy all by a few peeled off miles. He got to his feet and went back to the car. James was there, tugging at him, trying to get him turned away, but here's the thing about Freight Train: he was in the best shape of his entire life. A legitimate NBA talent with muscle in spades. James had no chance of holding him back, but he did slow him down. Got in his way enough so that by the time he was sitting in his van, trying to put the thing into drive, James madly punching the door and screaming for him to get the fuck out, a cop car pulled in.

Two officers climbed from the cruiser and Todd got out of the van. “Hey, guys,” he tried, woozily.

“Shut up,” James whispered.

It didn't matter that Todd was drunk—what's another MIP?—but it did matter that one of the cops was the safety officer assigned to the high school basketball tournament who Todd had
joked with during the first few rounds. A man named Officer Jakes, someone Todd felt too comfortable with.

“Son,” Officer Jakes said, “why don't you have a seat.”

Todd laughed, tried to shrug it off. Became agitated when Officer Jakes told him to calm down. “Ah, come on Jakes, don't be a blowhard.” Todd took a drunken swing and missed by a mile. Jakes pinned big Freight Train against the police cruiser while James and the people awoken by the noise, ghosting the hotel windows, looked on.

His partner that night, Officer Pasadena, said, “Lucky that kid was so greased or he woulda took your head clean—”

“Shut up,” Jakes told him.

“What is this?” shouted the Flying Finn, suddenly out, in pajamas, screaming from the balcony.

“Fuck you,” Todd growled and shifted his weight quickly to his pivot foot and tried to spin—a move that had never failed him before on the court—but he was drunk and underestimated his own weight. Jakes sloughed off, his wind knocked out, and Todd went too far laterally on his left knee. He felt it go watery the instant it happened. He cried out as the muscular tension left him and pain entered, a shot of it, as potent as anything. He collapsed. Officer Pasadena was on him roughly cuffing him next to the cruiser's wheel—an extra shove for good measure—and Todd knew he was past the point of recovery. It was the fear every elite athlete has on the edge of better things. His body, a willing partner up to that point, quitting.

Some things mattered and some things didn't. Genny Mori was pregnant and it turned out that mattered. Breathe. Todd had never expected it, didn't want it really, but it mattered. He married her and the Oregon fog settled down again.

Monday, December 17, 2007

JIMMY KIRKUS, SIXTEEN YEARS OLD—MINUTES AFTER THE WALL.

T
he door to the Brick House opens and a head peaks in. It's the janitor, Mr. Berg—Todd's once-best-friend. He finds the breaker box, flicks the switches. The big, overhead light fixtures, with their wire grills grinning, whine to life. The glow is still too new and hazy for detail. But it's warming up, building brighter all the time.

“Holy shit,” Berg says.

When James Berg first sees the body laid out bloody on the floor, naked but for shoes and underwear, the red light of the
EXIT
sign shining on him, he thinks the kid is dead.

“Holy shit,” he says again. He's backing away. A murder? Over what, drugs? All that stuff coming into town. The new one is meth, people are saying. He's back into the hallway, moving toward the door to the parking lot. Whole body is telling him to flee. Whoever did this is probably still around. Addicts will do anything for money. Every noise he hears behind him is the attacker come back to bash his head in. Hand on the push bar to exit, Berg stops. Thinks. He swallows, it doesn't go down. He coughs because of this. He has to call the police. Right now, call the police. But he hesitates. He's a coward, not just rushing in. The kid back there could still be alive. He probably
is
still alive. Back through the dark hallway, back to the gym. Lights groaning as they work, slow to warm up. That body still not moving. What a sad ending
for some poor kid. Shit, there'd be a media maelstrom. He takes out his cell phone. Three numbers to hit.

Then he notices something along the baseline. A gray marked-up basketball. Everyone in town knows that ball. That boy on the ground is Jimmy Kirkus. Berg rushes to him and holds his fragile head in his hands. Jimmy's chest still rises and falls. He's alive and the gym lights are getting brighter all the time.

Berg assumes Jimmy has been jumped and then the beating went too far. Didn't happen often in Columbia City, kids getting real violent with each other, but it wasn't unknown.
And after all he's been through?
It was a small enough town that whoever did it would be found by morning, if not sooner.

“Damn, Jimmy.” Berg feels terrible for not just rushing in, getting to the door to the parking lot before he could think himself out of it, come back and help.
James Berg: Coward
.

“He scores,” Jimmy sputters.

“Who got to you, kid?” There is blood everywhere. On the floor and also oozing and drying on the brick wall. Kid's face looks like a cut of steak.

“Huh?”

“Who jumped you? You been fighting?”

“No.”

“Don't worry, I'm going to call for help.” Berg has his cell out, pressing its bellybuttons, getting beeps. “Get the ambulance, the police and—”

“No!” Jimmy screams and then squirms in pain. “No, I was running. Just running.”

With his eyes, Berg traces the blood from the wall to Jimmy, and then back again.
Couldn't be. No. Nobody could do that.
Then he understands why there's so much blood on the wall. A path of drippings up to it. Jimmy's done it to himself and that's the scariest thing.

Berg helps him into his ripped clothes, hustles the kid to the cab of his truck. Jimmy goes where he's guided, a zombie. It's still snowing. Great twirling flakes touch down, individual masterpieces, piling up to be crunched through. Rain, this is, only frozen, memorialized. Berg shakes his head to clear the thought, focuses on the task at hand.

In the ride to the hospital, over the hill, right by Peter Pan Park, past Fultano's Pizza and the football field, past where Mr. Mori once had his dental office and past the new movie theaters, Berg keeps the radio jacked. Big news today: the Oregon State Athletic Association has decided to drop Columbia City High School down from 6A, the highest level, to 4A starting next year. The surprise isn't in the drop—the town has been hemorrhaging residents, and so students, for years—but in how far. Everyone assumed it would be 5A for the Fishermen. Now in 4A they'll be up against schools even tinier than they: Dayton, Burns, Milo. People are calling in, outraged or encouraged. They say OSAA should make it more like college—play in the division you're good enough to—not how it is, solely based on school size. Then there are others. People saying this will be good. Columbia City ain't what she used to be. Next year could be the start of something special. A run of titles in 4A.

Their last year with the big boys won't be easy either. This year's 6A division presents a uniquely demanding gauntlet. With Shooter Ackley out of Seaside, Ian Callert over in Canby, Danny Rubbe down in Cape Blanco—all NCAA Division I–bound athletes—not to mention Jesuit's factory of disciplined contenders, 6A is shaping up to be something to tell your kids about. Berg's got the windows down for cold air. He has to keep Jimmy awake. He knows that much. These call-in people with their outrage, they'll do it for him.
4A? This is a joke!
Whole town empty. The cold air isn't enough. He doesn't care what these people have to say. Only values the noise they make.
At least we know we'll kick butt.

“What the hell were you doing, Jimmy?” he shouts over the wind and radio.

Jimmy's head lolls on the end of his neck. “Where we going?” he asks. Blood bubbles up on his lips.

“The hospital. We're going to the doctor. You've been hurt.”

“I know.” There's a gurgle in the kid's throat and Berg wonders if he should stop the truck, make sure Jimmy isn't choking on his own blood. Instead he presses down on the gas harder. Truck roars. The hospital is nearby.

“Don't tell, OK?” Jimmy says after a little while. The sound of his voice is barely audible over people pissing on over the pseudo issue of sports divisions. Kid sounds like his father, Todd Kirkus, from back when they were best friends and he was about to do something Berg wasn't sure about.
Bergy? Be cool. Don't tell.

Tears come to Berg's eyes. “I won't tell. I won't.”

•   •   •

Two nurses come at them moments after they enter the ER waiting room.

“What happened?” the first nurse asks. Berg doesn't recognize her.

“Chris?” the second nurse shouts. “We need a bed out here, get us a bed.” This one Berg knows. He can't remember her first name, but she's a Parson. She was a couple grades below him in high school, her mother was the English teacher. He used to drink with her brother. Bud Lights and bonfires.

“Where's Todd?” the Parson nurse asks. “James, where's his father?”

But the bed is there and Berg is pushed aside in the activity as the first two nurses and a tall, bald man who must be Chris, lower Jimmy onto a wheeled gurney. Sarah. The second nurse's name is Sarah. Sarah Parson. Berg feels an unnatural amount of relief to
remember her name. With this, it somehow seems to him, everything will be OK.

Then a pale girl Berg has never seen before steps through the nurses and up to Jimmy just as he's about to be wheeled away. Young, still in high school probably. She bites her lip and reaches her hand out toward his head.

Sarah grabs her hand before she can touch the kid, holds it. “No, honey,” she says, “not now.”

“Is he going to be OK?” the girl asks in a shattered voice.

Jimmy just stares. Berg isn't sure he's heard her.

“He'll be OK,” Sarah says and places the girl's hand back at her side.

“Carla?” It's the Reverend Ferguson. New to town, homeschools his kids. This girl must be one of his, Berg thinks. “Carla, come here now.”

Chris, the bald male nurse, is pushing Jimmy's bed toward the door that leads into the ER. Berg walks with them. The door opens before they get there and some doctor out of Portland, because Columbia City can't seem to raise their own doctors—just janitors and Pepsi deliverymen—ushers the nurses back, already talking jargon Berg has no hope of following. Sarah stops, looks at Berg, and Berg stops. He can't go back there.

“Remember,” Jimmy calls out.

Mr. Berg releases a breath he hadn't known he was holding. “What?”

“You won't tell?”

The doors are closing. Berg nods his head, not sure if Jimmy can see.

“We'll take good care of him,” Sarah says, a calmness he could cry for in her voice.

Berg keeps nodding.

He turns back to the waiting room in time to see the pale girl
wavering out of the sliding doors, the Reverend Ferguson holding her elbow. She's visibly weak. “That's Jimmy Kirkus,” Berg hears her tell her father. “
The basketball player
.”

Berg doesn't know what's wrong with the girl to be here so late at night, to be so pale and sick, but something surely is. He feels like he's seeing a different side to the town he's always known and it frightens him. This is a world populated by pallid, shaky girls and boys bent on smashing themselves out. He wishes it were any other night, and he was home, watching the
Late Show
, smirking along with Letterman. He sits in one of the gray chairs, picks up the courtesy phone, checks for a dial tone, places it back down.

Berg remembers running into Jimmy and his father, Todd, years before. They were in the Safeway parking lot around Christmas, buying a tree from the Boy Scout sale. Jimmy couldn't have been more than two. Such a sweet kid, he ran around picking up tree trimmings. Couldn't believe those were free. Sweetest kid. Lately though, kid's been different—no surprise there with what he'd been through. Whole world's weight on him.

So maybe, in a way, Jimmy
was
jumped back in the gym; only by himself and not some other kid. The sweet Jimmy snuffed out by the new one. Mr. Berg shakes his head. He doesn't like thinking about things in this way. Brings him close to a black hole in his mind. All the possibilities and none of them right. Trapdoors. Slippery slopes. He had hated college for that reason and chose work as a janitor for the way it shrunk the world down.

First he calls Van Eyck beverages, gets Todd's cell number from a sleep-voiced kid who perks up at the word “emergency.” Hangs up on him quickly, lest he forget the number floating in his head, and dials Todd. Of course he does. He's the father of a kid too, isn't he? Jimmy Kirkus wasn't thinking straight when he told Berg not to tell. There are records and insurance claims to be factored in. Jimmy
is a minor, who the hell did the kid think would check him out? The phone is ringing and Berg's shame is building. Not rushing right in, or coming sooner to have prevented it happening in the first place, these are things he adds to his own case against himself.

Todd answers on the fourth or fifth ring, the oceanic roar of driving in the background. Berg pictures him in his Van Eyck Beverages delivery truck, working the night shift as always.

“Hello?”

“Todd, it's James. James Berg?”

There's the background roar and a sharp, rhythmic clicking too. Blinker?

“It's about Jimmy. I found him in the gym. I thought he'd been jumped. But that wasn't it.” The phone is fumbled, and in the ensuing scuffling, three bangs in a row, it sounds to Berg as though it's been dropped from a great height, though it was probably just from ear to lap. “Todd?”

“I'm here,” he says so quickly Berg can't be sure the phone was ever dropped in the first place.

“Jimmy was on the floor and . . .” Berg doesn't feel guilty for telling, just guilty he hadn't called sooner, from the gym, from the car ride over, from twenty-two years before.

When he's done there is only breathing on the other end. No words, but what could James expect? This was about Todd's kid, not their friendship. Still, he can't stand it, he presses on.

“I wish I would've known he was still in there, in the gym—Coach Kelly should have told me. I would've never. Well, you know that. Listen. He's at the hospital now. I guess you'll have to come pick him up.” There's a shifting sound, the pop of the truck door opening, Todd getting out. James pictures him pacing on the side of the highway. He hears a siren from far off, though he can't tell if it's on his end or Todd's. He looks up and notices the nurse,
Sarah, staring at him from the check-in desk, listening. He wants to say more, but can't, not with her there.

Then a click. Hung up on. Not even a scrap of gratitude, forgiveness, or acknowledgment. James throws the phone across the lobby. Cord yanks it short so it bashes onto the floor, receiver cracked. He looks up. Sarah's all owl eyes from where she sits.

The dial tone, dull but somehow urgent, bleeds out.

“I'll pay,” James says. “The phone. I can pay for that.”

•   •   •

Look at our kid Jimmy, asleep in a hospital bed. He's dreaming beautiful things. Car window studded with water. Taillights smeared red across the windshield. Paul Simon singing on and on from the CD player about diamonds on the soles of her shoes. Mom and Pops looking back at him through the rearview mirror, and then at each other—like they still care. Dex playing his Game Boy and asking Jimmy to “Please, please, just get me past the fireball plant in level eleven.” Watching the darkness outside the car from warm safety. A day he always wants to dream about, but never does. He's hovering, just on the dusty side of sleep, a great happy sadness welling within.

It's been a fitful hour of doctors coming in and administering tests with penlights and clicking sounds. And once, in the middle of it, a nurse with Mickey Mouse scrubs and a doctor with hairy spider hands laid him down and inserted him headfirst into a giant, whirring machine. The doctor had been kind, patted him on the foot and told him it was just a CT scan. Jimmy hadn't known what that meant, or what they were looking for with the machine, but he said, “OK, yeah,” and listened to the whirring and beeps for clues. He figured with a machine that big, with mechanics so obviously expensive, it could see straight into your brain. Poke around and tell if you had hurt yourself permanently,
but also, maybe, see exactly who you really were and what you wanted and who you wished to become. Jimmy isn't sure of what they found. This scares him. Like it's a test he might fail.