When Ghosts Come Home(29)

They spent the last few weeks of summer in this manner, playing 21, with Cody pretending to be Larry Bird and Jay pretending to be Magic Johnson, which would have been more fun had he had a teammate to pass the ball to. Jay did his best to keep his new Adidas high-tops clean, the ones Janelle had bought for him at the mall using the money his parents had left her, but at least he was breaking them in before the season began, and he figured that, as the new kid on the court at school, it would be more important to be good than look good. Each afternoon, after walking home from Cody’s, Jay would stand at the kitchen sink and clean his shoes, wiping down the black leather with a damp paper towel. That was where Rodney had found him one evening when he’d arrived home early from work.

Rodney had been holding the baby in his arms, jostling him gently and making funny faces at him. The baby’s wet, black eyes stared up at his father, his tiny fists curling and uncurling. Rodney turned his body so that Jay could see the baby as he cradled him. “Want to hold your little nephew?”

“Nah,” Jay had said. He tugged on the hem of his damp T-shirt. “I’m all sweaty.”

“What are you doing?”

“Cleaning my shoes,” Jay said. “Trying to anyway.”

“You been shooting hoops with that Rivenbark boy at the end of the road?”

Jay did not know Cody’s last name and had never asked it and had never heard him tell it, but as far as he knew, Cody was the only boy on their road aside from himself.

“Cody?” he asked.

“That white kid.”

“That’s Cody,” Jay had said. “Yeah, we play ball sometimes.”

Rodney had looked down at the baby, and then he’d looked up at Jay. Jay could feel his brother-in-law’s eyes boring into the side of his face.

“Just be careful,” Rodney said.

With what? Jay had wondered. Playing with a white kid? Playing with a poor kid? Getting injured before tryouts? He’d wanted to ask Rodney what he meant, but he hadn’t said a word, had just continued wiping down his shoes, squeezing the paper towel so that the dirty water dripped into the sink.

“His folks,” Rodney said. He’d shrugged. “You know, just be careful.”

The next day, when Jay came home from shooting ball at Cody’s, he’d found Rodney mixing cement in a wheelbarrow. He’d already used post-hole diggers to dig a hole to install the goal he’d purchased at the sporting goods store in Southport. The pole was lying on the grass, the shiny red rim already attached to the white fiberglass backboard where it leaned against Rodney’s truck.

Rodney, the hose in his hand trickling water onto the powdery mixture in the wheelbarrow, had nodded at the collection of pieces spread out around him.

“Pretty sweet, huh?” he’d said. He knocked the basketball out of Jay’s hands and shot it, one-handed, through the goal where it rested at almost ground level. “This old boy’s about to ball you up.”

But Rodney never shot baskets with him after that. He had always left for work before Jay got up for school, and he’d come home in the evening just before dinner. Jay always had homework, and Janelle was insistent that he do it all without getting up from the kitchen table after they’d put everything away after dinner.

Jay and Cody shot baskets and played one-on-one on the new goal, intuitively ending their play before Rodney came home from work, although Jay never mentioned why and Cody never brought it up. Janelle had never mentioned Cody either, and Cody never saw her, never stepped foot in the house, even leaving early one day to go home to use the bathroom, although Jay had invited him to use theirs. Jay went so far as to count the number of times Cody had watched him drinking water from the hose before he accepted Jay’s offer to take a sip. It had taken six days for Cody to say yes.

Occasionally, Janelle had asked Jay if he’d made friends at school, and he had usually answered “Not really” or “Not yet,” which was true for the most part. Given their separate grades, he and Cody hadn’t really seen one another at school, but even when Jay had passed him in the hallway or stood near him on the blacktop after lunch, they had done little more than nod at one another before looking away.

After basketball tryouts had passed and neither of them had made varsity or JV, Cody because he decided not to try out and Jay because the country boys who did were bigger, faster, and better than he had anticipated, they stopped playing basketball at either Cody’s house or Jay’s. Jay kept to himself, watching television as the days grew shorter and slightly cooler, occasionally riding Rodney’s old ten-speed into Southport to buy a Coke and a bag of chips at the convenience store if he had money or if Janelle was willing to give him some. She’d been gentle with him, and he’d known it was because she’d felt badly that he hadn’t made the basketball team and that he missed his friends and had not made new ones to replace the old. The kids in Brunswick County, whether they were Black or white, seemed suspicious of him and his closely shaved head and his long shorts and the quick way he spoke to them when and if they spoke to him. The kids he met at school walked and talked slowly, laughed quietly and rarely, and wore blue jeans and T-shirts no matter how hot it was outside.

Rodney had seemed to sense Jay’s loneliness with more acuity than anyone, and it was clear to Jay that Rodney had tried to trace his disposition back to his not making the basketball team. “Look, man,” Rodney had said. “I didn’t make it my freshman year either. And then I played varsity for the next three.”