Summer Ball Read online

  Then Tess asked Danny if she’d walk him to the dock.

  He reached up without saying anything and took the camera bag off her shoulder, surprised at how heavy it was.

  There was nobody on the beach, maybe because it had gotten cold all of a sudden, like the total opposite of the day. It was darker than it should have been at eight o’clock in the summer, probably because of the storm predicted for later that night.

  “I loved that stupid camera,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “When I called my uncle, he said he’d drive me to Portland tomorrow. There’s a great camera store there,” Tess said.

  “So you’ll get a new one.”

  “It just won’t be this one.”

  He saw the pink dots reappear on her face, saw her eyes getting big again. But then Tess gave a quick shake of her head, like she was telling herself that she was done crying, at least for tonight.

  “You’re sure it was Lamar,” she said.

  “I’m sure.”

  “It’s got to be more than him just wanting to get at you through me,” she said. “Doesn’t it?”

  She really wanted to figure this out, understand it. By now, Danny knew Tess was curious about everything, even Incredibly Dumb Guy Stuff.

  “He’s a bully,” was the best Danny could do. “Bullies do stuff like this because they can. They do it even if they’re as good at something as Lamar is at basketball. Heck, you see it all the time in pro sports.” Smiling now as he heard himself say that to her. “Well, you don’t, but I do. Guys like Lamar get away with everything until teams finally decide they’re not worth the trouble. And even after that,” Danny said, “they usually get a few last chances.”

  “That doesn’t make it right.”

  “It’s not right,” Danny said. “It’s just sports.”

  “But that’s not the way it is with you in sports,” she said. “Or Will or Ty or Tarik or even Rasheed.”

  “Nope,” he said, “you’re right about that. Maybe most right about Rasheed, even if he’s the one of us you know the least. He told me that people can’t get past his looks, and maybe I couldn’t either, at least at the start. But it turns out he’s more old school than I am.”

  “Impossible,” she said. “Whatever the oldest school in the world is, you’re older than that.”

  They heard two sounds, one after another. First, thunder in the distance, then the sound of the boat. Danny swiveled his head around and saw the floating water bed heading their way, Tess’s uncle behind the wheel.

  Danny handed Tess her camera bag and as he did, like it was all one motion, he got up on his tiptoes and gave her a hug. It didn’t last long. But it was definitely a hug.

  When he pulled back he said, “You okay for real?”

  “I will be tomorrow,” she said, then pointed a finger at him. “And remember. No going looking for Lamar tonight. No payback. No more trouble. Promise?”

  He nodded.

  “Say it, mister.”

  “I promise.”

  She told him he didn’t have to walk her the rest of the way, ran down toward the boat and tossed her bag to her uncle, no longer having to worry about damaging what was inside. Her uncle reached up to take her hand. As he did, Tess turned around and shouted to Danny at the other end of the dock.

  “Do not even think about losing to that guy,” she said.

  They both knew who she meant.

  “Got it,” he said.

  I just hope we get the chance in the play-offs, he thought.

  And if we do, I just hope I get my chance.

  The rain started as the boat pulled away from the dock, and within about a minute was coming down hard. Danny ran up the hill, wondering if the guys might still be playing cards. But he didn’t feel like cards tonight. He decided to go back to Gampel instead, read one of the actual books he’d brought with him to camp, an old-time book his dad had given him called Championship Ball, about a guy his dad always referred to as Chip Hilton, All-America. “When it comes to basketball,” Richie Walker said, “Chip Hilton, All-America, is just like you, only taller.”

  Danny came out of the woods and took a hard right toward Gampel, walking now. There was no point in running—he was already soaking wet, the rain had become a storm that fast.

  He was about fifty yards from Gampel when he saw Lamar standing alone in the rain between Danny and the front door, not wearing a Kobe jersey on this night, wearing a purple Lakers hoody instead, smiling at Danny like he’d been waiting for him.

  Great.

  Danny just put his head down and kept walking, remembering what he’d just said to Tess about no trouble. Even if trouble was standing right there in front of him.

  Lamar, in a voice loud enough to be heard over the wind and rain, said, “Too bad there about your girl’s camera.”

  Danny didn’t think Lamar would try anything. There were other kids all around, coming from different directions, running for shelter. So he just kept moving, thinking as he did about an expression his mom liked to use in class when one kid would say he’d only gotten into a beef because another kid was bothering him or her.

  Next time, she’d say, do not engage.

  “The things people do to other people’s property,” Lamar said. “It’s just a dang shame.”

  Danny was past him now, not wanting to run, almost to the door.

  “What?” Lamar said from behind him. “You don’t want to talk to me tonight?”

  Do not engage.

  Danny was at the door now, starting to turn the handle. He was that close to being inside and out of the rain and away from the sound of Lamar Parrish, who wanted to trash talk you even in the middle of a rainstorm.

  Danny turned around, not even sure why, looked right at Lamar, smiled at him now.

  “Hey, Lamar,” he said.

  “S’up, midget?”

  Danny dribbled an imaginary ball, made a motion like he was shooting his new jump shot, showing him that perfect form he was working on, like he was putting one up over Lamar from the outside. When he was done, he held the pose in a way he never would in a game, right arm still high, the way Michael Jordan held the pose the night he made the shot in the Finals to beat the Utah Jazz that time.

  As if the imaginary shot Danny’d just taken was money all the way.

  Now he walked into Gampel, not waiting to hear what else Lamar had to say, not caring, closing the door behind him, thinking to himself, That’s the way I want camp to end.

  At least in my dreams.

  22

  LAMAR GOT AWAY WITH IT, OF COURSE.

  “No nothin’ for a know-nothin’,” is the way Tarik described it.

  When Jeff LeBow asked about Tess’s camera, Lamar just said he shot baskets right up until he went to dinner with some of the guys from the Lakers and that if Mr. LeBow didn’t believe him, he should go right ahead and ask them. Then he acted hurt that Mr. LeBow would even think to ask him about something like that, saying, “If I’m gonna be a suspect for every little thing that happens from now to the end of camp, maybe I should make a call to Hoop Stars right now, see if they still want me.”

  Hoop Stars was an equally famous, competing camp in western Pennsylvania, Danny knew by now, fighting Right Way for the best players every summer, even though Hoop Stars started a couple of weeks later.

  “Fortunately, I got him calmed down,” Jeff said.

  Wow, Danny thought, what a relief.

  This was after lunch the next day. Danny was in his office, and Jeff was describing his meeting with Lamar, actually trying to tell them how much Lamar liked meeting Tess, how he was hoping to get what he called some Kodak-taking tips from her if she showed up again, just so he could have his own pictures to take home to his mom.

  Knowing he was wasting his time, Danny said, “He did it.”

  “If you don’t stop saying things like that,” Jeff said, “I’m going to end up breaking up a fight a day between you guys.”

  �
��I’m not looking to fight him,” Danny said. “I can see now that he’s going to win any kind of fight between us.” Then he paused just slightly before saying, “except maybe on the court.”

  “What do you want?”

  “For you to see him for what he really is, I guess.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Another guy in sports who’s a great player and a bad guy.”

  “I’m just a guy running a basketball camp,” Jeff said. “Josh Cameron’s camp. A camp Mr. Cameron is going to be showing up at any day now. And when he does, I’d prefer that he doesn’t think the whole thing has turned into Meatballs or one of those other dumb camp movies. You say you want to beat him on the court, so wait and beat him on the court.”

  Danny said he’d try and left.

  He was trying. His dad called it grinding. That morning he and Ty had gotten up early and worked out on the bad court, just the two of them, for an hour. Danny had worked more on defense than offense, knowing that one of the ways to get more minutes from Coach Powers in the games he had left was to show he could handle bigger guys, that when other teams tried to use his size against him—gee, that had never happened before—he wasn’t going to give up easy baskets.

  So they played one-on-one, and Danny told Ty to post up on him as much as he wanted, kept stopping the game to ask what he was trying to do on every play, what worked against that particular move and what didn’t.

  Ty said that what he concentrated on the hardest when he had a mismatch was to not bring the ball down. “Like coaches always say,” Ty said. “Bring the ball down, and you turn a big guy into a little guy.”

  Danny said, “I wish it were that simple.”

  Eight in the morning and it was so hot already they were sweating buckets. “Coach Rossi talks about it every day,” Ty said. “He says, anytime that ball comes down, it’s ours.”

  So they worked on that. Your natural reaction on defense was to put your hands up when a guy was getting ready to shoot. But the key was making your move right before that, reading the guy, keeping your hands out in front of you, ready to flick at the ball or snatch at it as the guy went from his dribble into his shot.

  Even against somebody as smart and good and long as Ty, Danny started to get the hang of it, getting his hands on the ball a surprising amount of the time. Every time he did, Danny told Ty not to make it easy for him. And every time he said that, Ty said he wasn’t making it easy, Danny was actually starting to annoy him.

  It was a good thing, they both decided, even if the long-range plan was annoying another guy Ty’s size.

  One who liked to go around in a Kobe jersey.

  The Celtics were 6–6 with two games to play.

  Danny was up to playing two quarters, without knowing if it was because Coach Powers thought he was improving or just because Rasheed was working on the coach every chance he got. But Danny was getting more of a chance, even when games were close in the fourth quarter.

  The Celtics weren’t the best team here, and Danny had seen them all by now. The two best teams were Ty’s team, the Cavaliers, and Lamar’s Lakers. That didn’t mean the Celtics couldn’t beat them in a one-game season. But in his heart—that old thing—he knew that could only happen if it was him and Rasheed in the backcourt, and not just for a handful of minutes a game.

  Nothing against Cole. Danny liked him as a kid and as a player, and he especially understood why Coach Powers liked him. He played hard, ran the offense the way Coach wanted it run and hardly ever deviated. Even on fast breaks, he did something Coach Powers was always preaching: stopped at the foul line every time, passed to one cutter or the other, only shot the ball himself as a last resort.

  He was just the wrong partner for Rasheed.

  Danny never said it out loud, even to the other guys, mostly because he knew he wasn’t playing well enough himself to be talking about anybody else. But Cole had no feel for the game. He had no imagination. Cole had tunnel vision. He could only see the offense or the defense they were supposed to be running. Like he was some kind of RoboGuard. He didn’t know when it was time to forget about the play, just give the ball to Rasheed no matter what they were trying to run.

  Danny did.

  Danny and Rasheed were both point guards, but that never seemed to matter. When they got the chance, they worked together the way Danny and Ty had with the Warriors.

  If you looked at them, you might think they couldn’t be more different, and they couldn’t have come from more different backgrounds.

  But Rasheed had been right: They played the same game.

  And in a camp full of big guys, Danny was convinced that the Celtics were at their best when they went small. That meant either Ben Coltrane or David Upshaw at center, Danny and Rasheed at guard, Tarik at power forward and Will at small forward. If Danny were the coach here the way he had been in travel—yeah, right, another in-your-dreams, Walker—those would be the five guys on the court when they were trying to win the game. Make the other team match up with their speed and shooting and ability to push the ball.

  Which is what they were doing now against Ty’s team, the Cavs, at the end of the first half.

  The game was originally scheduled on one of the outside courts, but the refs for their game had ended up someplace else. So it was being played in The House after the regular four o’clock game in there, and there were a ton of kids in the stands, even though it was getting close to dinnertime.

  Danny thought, It’s the same with everybody. If there was a game going on, you stopped to watch it. You couldn’t help yourself.

  Jack Arnold and Ty had scored most of the points for their team. Rasheed was carrying the Celtics, doing it today by scoring and rebounding. The Celtics were up four points with the ball, holding it for the last shot of the half. Danny had been in the backcourt with Rasheed for the past five minutes or so, playing at the Indy 500 speed that Coach Rossi and the Cavs always liked to play.

  They had been in a time-out when Coach Powers told Danny to go into the game. He looked at Danny and Rasheed, pointed one of those bony fingers at them and said, “I want you to find a way to slow this game down.”

  Rasheed just shook his head.

  “Coach, we can try,” he said. “But it would be like trying to ride a bike in the fast lane. We can beat these guys at their own game.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yeah,” Rasheed said, in that confident way he had. “I’m sure.”

  Now they were down to the last play of the half. The play Coach Powers had called from the sideline was simple enough: “Spread.” It was one you saw the real Cavaliers use all the time for LeBron James, at the end of a quarter or half or game.

  Give him the ball, give him some room, tell him to make something happen.

  On their team it meant giving the ball to Rasheed a few feet inside the half-court line and giving him so much room it looked like he and his man were playing one-on-one.

  Jack Arnold, the Boston kid, was guarding him. But Danny could see Ty hanging off Tarik, his man, ready to cut Rasheed off if he tried to go all the way to the basket when he finally made his move. Danny was on the right wing, knowing he was nothing more than a place for Rasheed to dump the ball off if he got jammed up on his drive.

  Will, who’d made a couple of threes earlier, was on the other wing, just to give the defense something else to think about.

  With fifteen seconds to go, Rasheed took the ball off his hip. He was always saying that it drove him crazy watching the NBA, he always thought guys waited too long to make their move. He started his now. Left-hand dribble, then right. Then left and right again. Two lightning crossovers that did exactly what they were supposed to: staple-gun Jack’s feet to the floor.

  He was past Jack then.

  Ty came up on his right, the Cavs’ center took away any room he had on his left. When the center moved up, Will’s man dropped down to guard Ben Coltrane.

  Nowhere for Rasheed to go. He gave a quick look a
t the clock and then, to the surprise of everybody in the place, Danny included, he wheeled and put the ball over his head and fired a screaming two-hand pass to Danny.

  Kicking it over to him the way he had that first time they’d really played together in the backcourt, the day Danny had shot the air ball instead of passing it back to him.

  He was wide open, about twenty feet from the basket, having pinched in. Ty ran right at him, waving his arms, thinking Danny had to be shooting.

  But Danny wasn’t shooting, and not just because he couldn’t even see the basket over Ty’s long skinny arms.

  He wasn’t shooting because of this:

  He wasn’t making the same mistake twice on a last shot.

  This time he was getting the ball back to Rasheed.

  The clock above the basket said five seconds.

  There was no way to get the ball over Ty, and way too much traffic on either side of Ty to try a bounce pass around him.

  Only one opening Danny could see:

  Between Ty’s legs.

  Danny put the ball on the floor and rolled it along the floor, rolled it through his legs as hard as he could, before Ty had a chance to react.

  All Rasheed, wide open himself now, had to do was lean over and grab it, and he had a layup.

  But he took his eye off the ball for a split second, like a baseball infielder taking his eyes off a routine ground ball—Rasheed was probably as shocked as everyone in the gym that a pass was coming to him this way.

  The ball went through his hands as easily as it had gone through Ty and rolled out of bounds as the horn for the half sounded.

  Rasheed banged an open palm against the side of his head in frustration, then looked at Danny and pointed to himself. Like, My bad. Danny just smiled. It would have been one heck of an assist.