Basketball Gods
Richard A. Sanchez
Published by Pachyderm Press
Copyright 2012 Richard A. Sanchez.
Previously published in The Pacific Review.
Cover design by J. R. Ramirez.
Photo used under Creative Commons from: Joelk75.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.
Basketball Gods
My older brother had biceps and calf muscles like halved apples tucked under his skin, he had a great jump shot that required nothing of him other than a tiny hop and a flick of his wrists, and the gap between his two front teeth – the one that everyone in my family had, that you could wedge two nickels into and still have room – grew close enough together between fourth and fifth grade that when school started up again, none of the kids in his class remembered that they used to tease him about it. I followed him around (and did my best to walk and talk like him), but Danny always said that he wished he were more like me. I was a quick learner, and had skipped kindergarten and second grade. At that rate, he said, I’d be done with school before him.
By the time I was eleven and my brother was fourteen, he had quit treating me like a little brother and more like a peer. If we did something knuckleheaded together and one of us got hurt or broke something, our mother would look at me, a full foot shorter than my brother, and ask if I had properly thought the situation through beforehand.
That was around the time I began to forget what my father looked like. I had to look at pictures to remember the salt-and-pepper eyebrows and the creases that decorated his cheeks, proof that he did in fact smile from time to time, just not in photographs. I knew my father’s chin by heart, the way his jaw was set; I only had to look up at my brother to remember those. It didn’t bother me most of the time that he was gone, but my brother had memories that I didn’t, a trip to the air museum in Palm Springs, during which he’d ridden our father’s shoulders for a closer view of the World War II fighter planes, and an elaborate train set they’d assembled together over a period of months, complete with tiny, fake trees and a general store the boxcars sped past and around.
Danny and I played basketball most days then, three or four hours after school and all day on weekends when we stopped only for a quick lunch. During those summers that we spent more time on the courts than at home, Mom cooked dinner like we shot hoops: according to the sun. The park was down the street from our house, and we knew that it wasn’t time to wrap up the last game until you stood at the top of the key and your shadow spread beyond the free-throw line. This celestial method of timekeeping always got us home as dinner was being set on the table, and we were never late, which was important to Mom. On the short walks home, my brother and I would pass the ball back and forth, practicing various skills we hadn’t yet mastered. As the sun sank behind the Little San Bernardino Mountains far in the distance, we would alternate dribbling between our legs and firing behind-the-back passes to one another until we got to our driveway, where everything from our clothes to the concrete we walked on was blue in different shades and our lips were the same dark gray as the ball.
I was pretty small, I remember, and the ten-cent opening between my upper incisors was still my most prominent feature, as it would be until I got braces in junior high. On the courts, prospective opponents looked at me with a mixture of skepticism and scorn, thinking I wouldn’t be able to keep up. They didn’t know that I’d been playing against my older brother for years by then, and that our one-on-one games were beginning to get somewhat interesting before he beat me each time.
Mostly we had the park to ourselves, so Danny and I would alternate one-on-one games with rounds of “Horse.” Every so often, a couple of guys would dribble up and challenge us for the court. Danny and I made a decent team; we held our own most of the time, anyway.
We played a pair of older guys once, after Danny assured them I wouldn’t be a hindrance to the game. They were in their twenties, both with stubble-smudged cheeks and tube socks pulled up to the middle of their shins. We couldn’t have played tackle football against them, but a friendly game of blacktop basketball was not out of the question. They had played as a two-man team before – that much was apparent – and they were big, but they couldn’t shoot to save their lives. That didn’t matter because Danny and I couldn’t get a single rebound against them. They could miss as many as five inside shots and still eventually score.
Both of them were sweaty and tired halfway through the first game. They played stiff under the basket, though, and extended their hands fingers-spread as high as they could when we drove the ball in close where the easy baskets should have been. Danny challenged them head on, either losing the ball or throwing up what we called “prayers,” desperate, unorthodox shots that were often lucky just to get airborne. These most frequently bounced off the rim or missed it entirely. I didn’t get much of a chance to do anything because my brother refused to pass to me. We took a water break after losing a few games, and Danny said he wanted to go home early.
“We’ll never beat them,” he said, hunched over, looking up at me with his hands on his knees, the posture he favored when engaged in a losing contest. If he was winning, Danny never got tired. He never showed it at least. “They’re slow. I should be able to get around them.”
“We need to pass more,” I said. “One of us can draw our defender outside and break for the hoop.”
Danny gave me a look that said he didn’t have much confidence in my analysis. “Let’s just beat these guys,” he said, picking up the ball.
I urged my brother to believe that we could win if we used our brains, but he wanted to beat our opponents with his body, to inflict upon them some of the frustration he was feeling. We had plenty of opportunities to utilize my new game plan. Whenever Danny had the ball out past the three-point line, I would run toward him, then spin around and dash for the basket. I was open under the basket quite a few times, but Danny repeatedly chose to dribble straight at his defender, who’d plant his feet and stick his hands up (like he’d done a hundred times that day) to block the prayers Danny eventually flung over his shoulder when there was nothing left for him to do.