"Bogdan," said Miss. "What are you doing?"
It was Mission X, he wanted to say. But he was elsewhere. In his head he heard the song at the end of the record, the one he and his mother would dance to, and things were rising up and rising up and it was all cymbals crashing and the music became thunder.
He moved in. His thumbs worked the hinge and opened the blades of the scissors. Trish's hair was a perfect little nest of golden curls. He reached out with one hand and grabbed a fistful. Everything seemed to happen at the same time: Trish screamed and he snipped, and a big clump of sand-coloured ringlets went spiralling down and landed on the floor beneath her desk.
Miss put her hand to her mouth. But she didn't do anything else. She made no move to stop him. She said nothing, just watched Bogdan looking down at the little blonde twists lying between his Zips. Trish had gone white. She sat there staring up at Bogdan with her mouth a perfect round 0. No sounds came out. Bogdan grabbed more hair and cut again, snipping away another chunk from the top of Trish's head. "Short-long," mouthed Bogdan. "Short-long."
But then he was tackled. Someone hit him from behind in the lower back and took him down, hard, onto the classroom floor. "You freak," came the voice of a boy pinning him to the tiles, and then there were hands wrestling the scissors from his fingers. He heard Mick Jagger singing softly, "Let it go, now," and then, "Yeah, let it go." So he let it go.
Lying there on the floor Bogdan had a perfect view up the row of desks to Miss, sitting there at the front of the classroom covering her mouth. The song in his head was fading: the end was just like the beginning, with the guitar light as air and piano sprinkled over top like bits of glass. Bogdan's eyes met his teacher's. Was she smiling behind her hand? In her eyes was something.
As one boy crushed his face into the floor and another twisted his arm behind his back, the song in Bogdan's head disappeared. In its place, with the wisps of Trish's hair scattered all around him, Bogdan could hear whimpering, and the whimpering became weeping, and Bogdan smiled, because the weeping was desperate, wailing and lost, and it was the most beautiful music he'd ever heard in his life.
DIZZY WHEN YOU LOOK DOWN IN
AFTER ABOUT TEN minutes of me catching him stealing looks across the waiting room, the big guy finally speaks. "I know you," he says, wagging a rolled-up Sports Illustrated in my direction. "Northern, right?"
"Yeah, Northern." I still can't place him.
"Point guard."
"These days?" I laugh. "Thursday nights at the Y, sure."
"But in high school you played point, right? For Northern?"
"Wow — that's, what? Ten years ago?"
He nods, that big head bobbing slow like its batteries are dying out. "1 went to St. Paul's."
He comes over, sits down with a seat between us. The magazine gets dropped and then there's this slab of a hand coming at me. Shaking it feels like sticking my arm inside a turkey.
"Brad Bettis," he says. "You're Dizzy Calder's big brother, right?"
"Yeah, that's right." I remember Bettis now, a monster of a four-man who'd bang away at our guys in the paint, knocking them down and then offering a hand to help them back up. A brute, all power, but classy — a yeti with a Catholic conscience. He's gained about sixty pounds, most of it under his chin. I don't ask him why he's here.
Bettis grins. "Dizzy Calder. Man, that kid could play."
I wait it out. The announcement for Dr. Singh comes on the PA again, the nurse starting to sound flustered. A little brown guy in scrubs rushes by flipping pages on a clipboard. His footsteps go clopping down the hall and then I'm left with Bettis, still grinning.
"Dizzy Calder," Bettis says again, shaking his head. "Whatever happened to him? They were asking for him all over the country, I heard."
"He went to Guelph for a semester."
"I heard that!"
"Yeah. Didn't play. Well, he was on the team but never saw the floor. They said he was too small to play three, and didn't have the outside game for a shooting guard."
"So, what? He dropped out?" Bettis has this look like I popped his favourite balloon.
Above Bettis's head, the clock on the wall reads a quarter to two. The anesthesia should be taking hold. They'll be starting now with the saws and blades and whatever else. But Bettis is leaning in, ready for some gossip. I can hear his breath coming in puffs. I tell him what he wants to hear. "He quit the team, finished the year at school, and then went down to Cuba."
"What, to play ball?"
"No." The PA crackles to life and it's the same nurse, sounding tired now. Bettis is waiting for more. "To build houses. He worked on some community project, building houses and pipelines and whatever. Ended up staying down there for six years."
Bettis sits back, all three hundred pounds of him slumping against the plastic chair. "Oh, yeah," he says, eyes narrowed, considering. You can almost hear the squeak of the hamster turning its wheel. After a moment, he picks up his Sports Illustrated from the floor, unrolls it, and smooths out the cover. Opening it, looking down, he says, "Too bad. That kid could play."
WHEN I GOT BACK to my folks' place, my mom had put together a box of Dizzy's basketball memorabilia for me to look through. Almost lost in that mess of offers from various schools on Athletic Department letterhead and MVP awards was a postcard that Dizzy kept tucked into the frame of his locker back in high school. Now, sitting here with the fluorescents buzzing overhead, Bettis beside me flipping through his magazine, I take it out from my jacket pocket and give it another look.
I don't know where he picked the thing up. It wasn't addressed or anything, it wasn't like anybody had sent it to him. Just a blank postcard, no postage. The picture is from a Celtics-Bulls game at Boston Garden, taken from high in the stands, up in the nosebleeds. Way, way down on the court you can make out ten players: the white and green of the Celtics' jerseys, the Bulls in their road red. Bill Cartwright and Horace Grant are out wide on the baseline, with Kevin McHale and Robert Parish hedging inside, and Larry Bird's sagging off Scottie Pippen down to the elbow. And over on the other wing, on the guy with the ball, is Danny Ainge. Poor Danny Ainge with his hands up, knees bent, feet shoulder-width apart — all fundamentals, all hope. In front of him, middribble, casual, like he's playing a game of pickup with some buddies and afterwards they'll all go out for a beer and wings or whatever, is Michael Jordan.
The Celtics are frozen, waiting, and the Chicago guys are like that too, standing there, no one with their hands up, no one looking for a pass. The rest of the Bulls are out for the show — best seats in the house. Maybe John Paxson's up there at the top of the key thinking about all the times in practice he's been left ducking while Jordan's up swinging on the rim over top of him, and he's thinking, All right, Danny Ainge — good fucking luck.
Before games, Dizzy took that postcard down from his locker and stared at it, finishing off the highlight reel in his head. In his mind he'd be way up there with his head scraping the roof of the Garden, bouncing around in that crowd of lunatics splashing whisky into big cups of fountain soda, leaning forward to see what the hell law of physics Jordan was going to break this time.
"WHAT YOU GOT there?" This is Bettis, curling and uncurling the Sports illustrated in his hands.
I hold the postcard up so he can see it. Bettis squints. "What's that? Celts-Bulls?"