When Ghosts Come Home(28)

When his sister had been home, there hadn’t been much for Jay to do aside from riding Rodney’s old bicycle up and down the hot, humid road past old, quiet houses or dribbling his basketball in the driveway, which, thankfully, was paved, unlike so many other driveways in the Grove, many of which were made of gravel and shells or white, powdery sand. He planned on trying out for the basketball team in the fall, aiming for varsity, but planning for JV. Rodney had told him that kids in the county took basketball seriously, but Jay figured none of them could possibly be as good as the kids he’d played against on the playground at school or at the boys’ club in his neighborhood. Even the white kids he’d played against at the YMCA on Saturday afternoons when he could convince his mother or father to drop him off had been good, all of them wanting to be Larry Bird, throwing elbows and camping out on the three-point line and clapping their hands at whoever had the ball.

Jay had tried to model his game on the swift-footed guards instead of the lumbering post players: Isiah Thomas, Walt Frazier, and even Michael Jordan, the college kid at UNC who’d made a name for himself that spring after sinking the championship-winning shot against Georgetown.

One hot afternoon when he was out in the driveway dribbling his basketball and thinking about the toll the cement was taking on the soles of his new black Adidas, he paused in his routine and detected the rhythmic thump, thump of a ball being dribbled somewhere close by. Then he heard the unmistakable clang of a ball bouncing around the inside of a rim before falling through the net. He walked to the end of the driveway, his ball held against his hip, and stood there, craning his neck to turn his ears in both directions up and down the otherwise silent street, searching for the source of the sound.

Since moving into his sister’s house, he had seen no other kids his age on her street, and he’d grown bored of his loneliness and equally fearful of the possibility of not laying eyes on another boy his age before school began at the end of August.

A few houses down to his right, their road connected to a perpendicular road that led farther into the community. On his left, the road in front of Janelle’s house continued on past several houses before turning to dirt—sand, really—and disappearing into the woods. The sound of the ball bouncing and hitting against a rim seemed to be coming from that direction, so Jay set out in search of it, his own basketball still held to his hip as if he were holding a baby there.

The noise grew louder and Jay more certain of its cause when the road turned from asphalt to earth. He had never walked or been driven this far. Up ahead he could see outbuildings and work equipment and cleared land, and he wondered if he’d stumbled upon some kind of farm. He continued walking past pine trees fronted by dense bushes clumped with Virginia creeper and thick, woody vines until a clearing gave way to a small, paved patch of land, where a white boy about Jay’s age stood, sinking bank shots against a wooden backboard on a goal that, just by looking at it, Jay knew was a few inches under regulation height.

Jay stood there, watching, until the boy must have felt Jay’s eyes on him. He stopped shooting, picked up his old, dusty ball, and turned to face Jay. The boy’s eyes were big and dark; his brown hair was short but grew in a long tuft down the back of his neck. He wore black shorts and a black mesh tank top so dirty with dust that it appeared gray.

The boy looked at the basketball that Jay held, and he nodded by way of hello. “Want to shoot?” he asked.

Jay didn’t speak or move. He waited for the boy to turn his back and resume his jump shots, and then he left his spot by the dirt road and walked to the opposite side of the crude half-court from where the white boy stood, still shooting jump shots, the ball bouncing back to him as if its path were preordained.

Jay took his first shot, and the ball hit just inside the rim and bounced around before popping out.

“It’s a tight rim,” the boy said. “That’s why I bank them, get them to fall right through.”

“It’s low too,” Jay said, the first words he’d spoken. “By a couple inches.”

“Easier to dunk on, though,” the boy said. He hadn’t looked at Jay since inviting him to shoot, and he didn’t look at him now.

Jay rebounded his shot and dribbled back out. He stopped and looked at the boy. “Can you dunk that?”

“I might could,” the boy said. He paused and looked over at Jay. “Can you?”

“I might could get the rim,” Jay said. He set his ball down, and then he stood straight. He charged toward the goal and sprang off his left foot and closed the tips of his fingers around the rim, pulling on it just enough for it to vibrate against the backboard. When he landed, he turned and looked at the boy, expecting something, but he didn’t know what.

“Want to play 21?” the boy asked.

“Yeah,” Jay said. “Let’s use my ball.”

And they did. The boy was strong, stronger than Jay, and surprisingly so given his skinny arms and legs and what his mesh tank top revealed of his bony, bird chest. He was a good shot, but Jay was a little quicker and a better dribbler. But even with those advantages, the boys nearly played one another to a draw, with the competition going to a decisive third game, which the white boy won with free throws that took him to 21.

The boy’s name was Cody, and he was fifteen and would be going into the tenth grade at South Brunswick, where his mother worked in the school cafeteria, doing what, Jay never asked and was never told. Cody’s father was a handyman of sorts, at least that was what Jay had been able to discern given the tools and unfinished projects strewn about the outside of the trailer where Cody lived with his parents, an only child, much like Jay now felt himself to be.