I am not a great basketball aficionado myself and I rather left it to Azazel to make sense out of what was happening. His intelligence, although dmonic rather than human, is intense.
After the game he said to me,"It seems to me, as nearly as I could make out from the strenuous action of the bulky, clumsy and totally uninteresting individuals in the arena, that there was excitement every time that peculiar ball passed through a hoop."
"That's it," I said. "You score a basket, you see."
"Then this protege of yours would become a heroic player of this stupid game if he could throw the ball through the hoop every time?"
"Exactly."
Azazel twirled his tail thoughtfully. "That should not be difficult. I need only adjust his reflexes in order to make him judge the angle, height, force-" He fell into a ruminative silence for a moment, then said,"Let's see, I noted and recorded his personal coordinate complex during the game… Yes, it can be done. -In fact, it is done. Your Leander will have no trouble in getting the ball through the hoop."
I felt a certain excitement as I waited for the next scheduled game. I did not say a word to little Juniper because I had never made use of Azazel's demonic powers before and I wasn't entirely sure that his deeds would match his words. Besides, I wanted her to be surprised. (As it turned out, she was very surprised, as was I.)
The day of the game came at last, and it was the game. Our local college, Nerdsville Tech, of whose basketball team Leander was so dim a luminary, was playing the lanky bruisers of the A1 Capone College Reformatory and it was expected to be an epic combat.
How epic, no one expected. The Capone Five swept into an early lead, and I watched Leander keenly. He seemed to have trouble in deciding what to do and at first his hands seemed to miss the ball when he tried to dribble. His reflexes, I guessed, had been so altered that at first he could not control his muscles at all.
But then it was as though he grew accustomed to hsi new body. He seized the ball and it seemed to slip from his hands-but what a slip! It arced high into the air and through the center of the hoop.
A wild cheer shook the stands while Leander stared thoughtfully up at the hoop as though wondering what had happened.
Whatever had happened, happened again-and again. As soon as Leander touched the ball, it arced. As soon as it arced it curved into the basket. It would happen so suddenly that no one ever saw Leander aim, or make any effort at all. Interpreting this as sheer expertise, the crowd grew the more hysterical.
But then, of course, the inevitable happened and the game descended into total chaos. Catcalls erupted fromt the stands; the scarred and broken-nosed alumni who were rooting for Capone Reformatory made violent remarks of a derogatory nature and fistfights blossomed in every corner of the audience.
What I had failed to tell Azazel, you see, thinking it to be selfevident, and waht Azazel had failed to realize was that the two baskets on the court were not identical; that one was the home basket and the other the visitors' basket, and that each player aimed for the appropriate basket. The basketball, with all the lamentable ignorance of an inanimate object, arced for whichever basket was nearer once Leander seized it. The result was that time and again Leander would manage to put the ball into the wrong basket.
He persisted in doing so despiet the kindly remonstrances of Nerdsville coach, Claws ("Pop") McFang, which he shrieked through the foam that covered his lips. Pop McFang bared his teech in a sigh of sadness at having to eject Leander from the game, and wept openly when they removed his fingers from Leander's throat so that the ejection could be carried through.
My friend, Leander was never the same again. I had thought, naturally, that he would find escape in drink, and become a stern and thoughtful wino. I would have understood that. He sank lower than that, however. He turned to his studies.
Under the contemptuous, and even sometimes pitying, eyes of his schoolmates, he slunk from lecture to lecture, buried his head in books, and receded into the dank depths of scholarship.
Yet through it all, Juniper clunk to him. "He needs me," she said, her eyes misting with unshed tears. Sacrificing all, she married him after they graduated. She then clunk to him even while he sank to the lowest depth of all, being stigmatized with a Ph.D. in physics.
He and Juniper live now in a small co-op on the upper west side somewhere. He teaches physics and does research in cosmogony, I understand. He earns $60,000 a year and is spoken of in shocked whispers, by those who knew him when he was a respectable jock, as a possible candidate for the Nobel Prize.
Juniper never complains, but remains faithful to her fallen idol. Neither by word nor deed does she ever express any sense of loss, but she cannot fool her old godfather. I know very well that, on occasion, she thinks wistfully of the vine-covered mansion she'll never have, and of the rolling hills and distant horizons of her small dream estate.
"That's the story," said George, as he scooped up the change the waiter had brought, and copied down the total from the credit-card receipt (so that he might take it off as a tax-deduction, I assume). "If I were you," he added. "I would leave a generous tip."
I did so, rather in a daze, as George smiled and walked away. I didn't really mind the loss of the change. It occurred to me that George got only a meal, whereas I had a story I could tell as my own and which would earn me many times the cost of the meal.
In fact, I decided to continue having dinner with him now and then.