A few houses down to his right, their road connected to a perpendicular road that led farther into the community. On his left, the road in front of Janelle’s house continued on past several houses before turning to dirt—sand, really—and disappearing into the woods. The sound of the ball bouncing and hitting against a rim seemed to be coming from that direction, so Jay set out in search of it, his own basketball still held to his hip as if he were holding a baby there.
The noise grew louder and Jay more certain of its cause when the road turned from asphalt to earth. He had never walked or been driven this far. Up ahead he could see outbuildings and work equipment and cleared land, and he wondered if he’d stumbled upon some kind of farm. He continued walking past pine trees fronted by dense bushes clumped with Virginia creeper and thick, woody vines until a clearing gave way to a small, paved patch of land, where a white boy about Jay’s age stood, sinking bank shots against a wooden backboard on a goal that, just by looking at it, Jay knew was a few inches under regulation height.
Jay stood there, watching, until the boy must have felt Jay’s eyes on him. He stopped shooting, picked up his old, dusty ball, and turned to face Jay. The boy’s eyes were big and dark; his brown hair was short but grew in a long tuft down the back of his neck. He wore black shorts and a black mesh tank top so dirty with dust that it appeared gray.
The boy looked at the basketball that Jay held, and he nodded by way of hello. “Want to shoot?” he asked.
Jay didn’t speak or move. He waited for the boy to turn his back and resume his jump shots, and then he left his spot by the dirt road and walked to the opposite side of the crude half-court from where the white boy stood, still shooting jump shots, the ball bouncing back to him as if its path were preordained.
Jay took his first shot, and the ball hit just inside the rim and bounced around before popping out.
“It’s a tight rim,” the boy said. “That’s why I bank them, get them to fall right through.”
“It’s low too,” Jay said, the first words he’d spoken. “By a couple inches.”
“Easier to dunk on, though,” the boy said. He hadn’t looked at Jay since inviting him to shoot, and he didn’t look at him now.
Jay rebounded his shot and dribbled back out. He stopped and looked at the boy. “Can you dunk that?”
“I might could,” the boy said. He paused and looked over at Jay. “Can you?”
“I might could get the rim,” Jay said. He set his ball down, and then he stood straight. He charged toward the goal and sprang off his left foot and closed the tips of his fingers around the rim, pulling on it just enough for it to vibrate against the backboard. When he landed, he turned and looked at the boy, expecting something, but he didn’t know what.
“Want to play 21?” the boy asked.
“Yeah,” Jay said. “Let’s use my ball.”
And they did. The boy was strong, stronger than Jay, and surprisingly so given his skinny arms and legs and what his mesh tank top revealed of his bony, bird chest. He was a good shot, but Jay was a little quicker and a better dribbler. But even with those advantages, the boys nearly played one another to a draw, with the competition going to a decisive third game, which the white boy won with free throws that took him to 21.
The boy’s name was Cody, and he was fifteen and would be going into the tenth grade at South Brunswick, where his mother worked in the school cafeteria, doing what, Jay never asked and was never told. Cody’s father was a handyman of sorts, at least that was what Jay had been able to discern given the tools and unfinished projects strewn about the outside of the trailer where Cody lived with his parents, an only child, much like Jay now felt himself to be.
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.