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Over the next few minutes, no doubt, would come stage two of his decline and fall. The game was three days away, which meant that today and tomorrow the first team would scrimmage with the second team. The second team would be nothing but sparring partners, mimicking the Cinci
Out of the corner of his eye Jojo saw a shimmer of Dupont mauve enter the locker room. He didn’t need to look straight at the man to know it was Coach in his starter jacket. Well—it would be okay to look at Coach, he decided. Besides, he couldn’t resist. Nobody could. At any given moment Coach was about to explode with anger—or turn into a stern but loving father appealing to your better self. So Jojo turned his head. There he was, Buster Roth, in a deep mauve nylon starter jacket emblazoned with DUPONT in gold letters. Behind him were two assistant coaches, Marty Smalls, who was white, and Skyhook Frye (“Sky” for his height, “hook” for his favorite shot as a center for Dupont…back when), a towering black man. All fourteen players were looking at Coach. His eyes were narrowed, and he had folded his eyebrows in toward one another, but it was still impossible to read his face. He stopped a step or so from where his players sat on the benches in front of their lockers and put his fists on his hips, which was not a good sign. He rocked back on his heels and drew his chin down toward his clavicle, which seemed to widen his already thick neck and make his head look as if it had erupted from the throat of the canary yellow polo shirt he was wearing. That was not a good sign, either. Then he ran his eyes over his flock slowly, one by one. The silence became a mounting pressure.
He motioned to Marty Smalls to wheel the blackboard over to where everyone could see it, which he did.
“Marty, gimme some chalk.” Which he did.
“And gimme a red, too.” Which he did. “Okay. Okay. Cinci
Whereupon Buster Roth started drawing an elaborate diagram on the blackboard in white and red, showing the Cinci
“They’ve still got Jamal Perkins,” Coach continued, “and he’ll be down there holding, elbowing, stomping, and generally fouling the shit out of whichever one of you’s closest to the basket.”
Reluctantly, woefully, Jojo paid close attention to what Coach had to say about Perkins’s role. Soon would begin stage three of the demise of Jojo Johanssen: the moment he stepped out onto the court playing the role of a dummy representing Jamal Perkins for the benefit and greater glory of the Viper-driving Vernon Congers.
Coach finally completed his discourse and turned away from his chalk-board and said, “Okay, you got that?” Nods all around. “Anything else you need to know?” Fourteen silent faces. “Okay. Let’s get started. Charles, Mike, Cantrell, Vernon, Alan—you’re Cinci
As Marty Smalls stepped forward with a freshly laundered stack of yellow practice shirts, Jojo sat catatonically on his bench, paralyzed by conflicting waves of wonder and belief. If Congers was playing for “Cinci
Congers was on his feet but motionless, holding a pressed and folded yellow shirt absentmindedly and staring at Coach, not with hostility or even bafflement but with yearning, as if begging Coach to say, “Wait a minute, what are you doing with a yellow shirt?” But Coach was already leaving the room with Skyhook Frye. Marty Smalls was now busy distributing yellow shirts to the three swimmies—Holmes Pearson, Dave Potter, and Sam Bemis—and mauve shirts to Treyshawn, André, Dashorn, Curtis—and, without so much as a comment or a change of expression…to him. He still couldn’t believe there was no catch to what was taking place.
By now most of the others had put on the shirts and were leaving the room. Oh, fuck! If he didn’t get a move on, there would just be him and Congers in the locker room. That would truly be embarrassing. Jojo slipped the mauve shirt over his head and his torso as fast as he could. Congers’s back was turned. He was facing his locker, looking straight ahead, and still holding the yellow shirt. Holy shit, the guy had some build. The muscles of his broad brown back seemed sculpted by light and shadow. His upper back was as wide as a door. Congers could a
When Jojo reached the floor of the Buster Bowl, the mauve shirts and the yellow shirts had already begun warming up. The sound of basketballs bouncing or rattling off hoops in a huge empty arena like this always stirred Jojo. The only lights were the fields of LumeNex floods at the bottom of the bowl.
Out of nowhere came Buster Roth, who motioned to Jojo to follow him to a shadowy stretch near the stands, directly behind the great goosenecked stanchion of one of the backboards.
He clapped Jojo on the upper arm and said, “Jojo, I’ve been riding you pretty hard for the past couple of weeks, haven’t I?” Jojo didn’t know what to say, but Coach didn’t seem to expect an answer. “I wouldna done it without a reason.” Buster Roth was in his stern but fatherly mode. “Jojo…you’ve been…tentative out there, preoccupied…worried about something. You don’t have to tell me. That part don’t matter. What matters is, I had to do something to get that”—he clenched his teeth and brought his right fist up in front of his heart and tightened it until it shook from the hyper-contraction of the muscles—“back into your solar plexus. You can’t just tell a player he’s gotta get his juice back. You gotta put him in a position where he either gets it back or he don’t. Nobody’s good enough—nobody—to be complacent at this level or so distracted that he loses that—” He did the shaking-fist semaphore again. “Okay. Don’t think about it anymore. Just keep on showing me you got it. Now, go get ’em.”
Jojo knew he should say thanks, Coach, but he couldn’t get those words out. Thankful wasn’t what he felt—not thankful, not victorious, not elated, not relieved, nor anything else he could put a name to. Messed with came close, but that wasn’t quite it, either. This shirt he had on seemed in some way counterfeit.
He and his tainted shirt headed on out to the court. Thanks to the precision of the LumeNex lighting systems, the transition from the gloom to the court, with its futuristic backboard stanchions at either end, was like stepping out of the wings onto a stage on which awaited a glory the whole world could see. Or the whole TV-watching world, anyway. This is the only place I’m happy, he said to himself, and the weight of the past two weeks began to slide from his shoulders. If Congers himself came up to him right now, it wouldn’t faze him for a second. Down at this end, the starters were warming up; at the other end, “Cinci