“Why do you keep playing with him?”
“I don’t know, honey. It’s so demoralizing. And I feel trapped. It’s a terrible, destructive, and endless circle.”
“Just like poverty,” she said.
“It’s oppression and slavery,” he said. “Ed is, like, England, circa 1363.”
“Well, Braveheart,” she said. “If there’s a revolution, if you kill him, I’ll help you hide the body.”
They laughed.
“Hey,” she said, and checked her watch. “The boys won’t get home for forty-three minutes.”
Nineteen minutes later, after they’d made love, after he’d kissed her belly and thighs and moved his tongue and hips in the same way he’d moved them for nineteen years, and after she’d chewed on his collarbone and pulled his hair and sucked on his lips in the same way she had for those same nineteen years, and after they’d had the most recent orgasms of a one-thousand-orgasm marriage, they laughed again.
“Damn,” she said. “That was efficient.”
“Teamwork,” Joey said.
Later that night, unable to sleep, Joey tried to sneak out of bed.
“Hey,” she said. “Are you okay?”
“No,” Joey said.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“I keep thinking about Ed. I was pretty hard on him today. I want to apologize.”
“It’s three in the morning. You can’t call him this late.”
“I’m not going to call him. I’m going over to see him.”
“You’re crazy,” she said. “He’s crazy. Basketball just makes you guys crazy.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Joey said. But she was right. Ed’s ex-wife, Joey’s cousin, had actually claimed that Ed’s hoops habit — he played at least three times a week — was an irreconcilable difference. And the judge had mockingly agreed.
“Just don’t divorce me because of ball,” Joey said.
“Just don’t wake up the boys,” Sharon said.
She rolled over and went back to sleep. Joey got dressed, warmed up his car, and drove toward Big Ed’s apartment building. Divorced for two years, Ed lived in a studio apartment with his plasma television. It was a much better relationship than the one he’d had with his wife.
“I don’t miss her,” Ed had said more than once. “But I miss seeing my son every day. And I miss seeing us all together, you know?”
Joey knew.
On his way to Ed’s place, Joey noticed a lone figure shooting hoops on the St. Jerome basketball court. It was too dark and far for Joey to be sure, but the night-shift hoopster was approximately the same size and shape as Big Ed.
Joey pulled over, turned off the car, and watched the maybe-Ed shoot and miss jump shot after jump shot. Joey kept score.
Miss. Off the front rim.
Miss. Off the side of the backboard.
Miss. Front rim.
Miss. Off the top of the backboard.
Miss. Front rim.
Air ball.
Joey watched the man, unguarded and alone on the court, miss twenty-one jump shots in a row. In the dark, in such a large but quiet city, it was an eerie display of ineptitude.
Then maybe-Ed dribbled left and right and took a running jump shot and scudded it off the bottom of the rim. Maybe-Ed angrily grabbed the rebound and threw the ball as hard and far as he could. It flew maybe fifty feet through the air, bounced through a parking lot, rolled across the manicured grass, and came to a rest at the base of a pine tree.
“Nice shot,” Joey said to himself.
Maybe-Ed walked to center court, perhaps in initial pursuit of the ball, but he stopped and stood still for an impossibly long time. Joey wondered how a person could stand so motionless for — yes, Joey kept checking his watch — twenty-three damn minutes. Joey wondered if this maybe-Ed needed help but, Jesus, what could he do to help anyway? Maybe this guy was some schizophrenic transient who was stuck in some dreamworld. Maybe this homeless hoopster was dangerous.
Two or three times, Joey told himself to start the car and drive away. What kind of sad bastard, homeless or not, plays basketball in the middle of the night? But worse, what kind of hoopster turns himself into a goddamn statue in the middle of that night?
And then, finally, this maybe-Ed — Screw that, Joey decided, it had to be Ed; yes, it was Ed — walked off the court, away from the basketball, and disappeared into the dark.
“Jesus,” Joey said aloud, and made the Sign of the Cross. He wasn’t Catholic — he wasn’t a Christian at all — but he knew he’d watched something unbeatific happen on a Catholic basketball court.
“Jesus,” Joey said again, just to be sure.
Soon after that, Joey started his car and drove back home. Inside the house, he took off his clothes — he was naked for the fourth time that day — and crawled back into bed with his wife.
“How’d it go?” she asked.
“What?”
“With Ed?” she asked. “How is he?”
“Okay, I guess,” Joey said.
“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked.
“No,” he said.
She kissed him and quickly fell back to sleep. Awake for hours more, Joey promised himself that he would never ask Big Ed about his late-night hoops practice. Every man must have his secrets, right? And every man was supposed to ignore every other man’s secrets. That’s how the game was supposed to be played.
IDOLATRY
Marie waited for hours. That was okay. She was Indian and everything Indian — powwows, funerals, and weddings — required patience. This audition wasn’t Indian, but she was ready when they called her name.
“What are you going to sing?” the British man asked.
“Patsy Cline,” she said.
“Let’s hear it.”
She’d only sung the first verse before he stopped her.
“You are a terrible singer,” he said. “Never sing again.”
She knew this moment would be broadcast on national television. She’d already agreed to accept any humiliation.
“But my friends, my voice coaches, my mother, they all say I’m great.”
“They lied.”
How many songs had Marie sung in her life? How many lies had she been told? On camera, Marie did the cruel math, rushed into the green room, and wept in her mother’s arms.
In this world, we must love the liars or go unloved.
PROTEST
My friend Jimmy was a pale Indian, though all of his brothers and sisters were dark. You might have wondered if Jimmy’s real father was a white guy. Some tribal members did wonder, but Jimmy had the same widow’s peak cowlick as his browner siblings. When he was little and living on the rez, Jimmy got teased a bunch. Other Indians called him Salt or Vanilla or Snow White, so yeah, he was insecure about his pigment. But he never would have admitted to that insecurity. Instead, he pretended to embrace it. He insisted on being called White Eagle Feather, or Eagle for short, like that was his real Indian name. But you don’t get to give yourself an Indian name, so most people ignored his wishes and still called him Jimmy. I was his best friend so I called him Eagle once in a while, but I usually called him Ego.
Yeah, Jimmy caught a lot of shit, even from me. But I was also the one who convinced him to go to Spokane Community College.
We shared a studio apartment in Hillyard, a poor neighborhood near the college, and went to class more often than not. Jimmy and I were studying auto repair and planned on opening a garage after we graduated. It was a small dream, I guess, but Jimmy acted like it was a supertraditional Indian thing.
“A car won’t be a car after we work on it,” he said. “It won’t have horsepower. It will be a powerful horse.”