Shame

The phone rang that evening. I was in the kitchen, making a cold meal of Thanksgiving leftovers while the rest of my family watched football in the other room.

“Hello,” I said through a mouthful of mashed potatoes.

“John Tilden?” came the voice.

“Speaking.”

“Is Phillip One Horse still working for you?”

I instantly straightened in my chair and choked down the last of my potatoes. “Yes, he is,” I said. “Why do you ask?”

“Can you think of any reason that he would leave your truck sitting in front of the police station with the keys under the floor mat?”

Yes, I could. I smiled sadly. “I’d guess he wanted to leave it someplace where he knew it would be safe,” I said. “We’ll be in to pick it up later, if that’s okay.”

“This is not a parking garage,” the voice said, as though I’d made the mistake of assuming that it was.

“I know,” I said. “Thanks for your help.” I hung up the phone and shook my head.

“Idiots,” I said, before lifting my spoon again. “Complete and total idiots.”

“Who is?” Michelle asked.

“Game over?” I filled my mouth with potatoes and swished them around between my teeth before hissing again: “Idiots!”

“Commercial break,” she said, coming over to put her hands on my shoulders. “Was that my parents?”

I snorted, which was almost enough to send mashed potatoes out my nose and did send me into a choking fit, which Michelle abetted in some way by pounding me between the shoulder blades. When at last I could speak and caught my breath, I said, “Phillip. He left the truck at the police station.”

She turned this information over in her head. “How did he get home?”

I shrugged, let out a long sigh. “Walked, I guess.”

“In this cold? Do you think he got home?”

Our eyes met.

“We should check,” I said. “If he’s still out there, he could freeze to death.”

“I’ll get my coat,” she said. Thirty seconds later we were on our way down the driveway in Michelle’s car.

We drove in silence until we got to the blacktop and the tires hummed beneath us. “Do you think he’s okay?” she asked finally, when the silence became oppressive.

“Why did you invite Samantha today?” I asked at the same time. Our questions got fouled on each other in midair like neighboring tree branches. Neither one was answered.

We drove on through the darkness, through the blowing snow occasionally obscuring the road, until we reached the highway and turned toward town. “Should we pick up the truck first?” She turned to me. “We should make sure that Phillip got home safe, right?”

“Right,” I said. “Let’s start at the station and then head toward his house to make sure we don’t miss him.”

We followed the street back to the highway, around the airport, driving slowly to make sure there was no one lying in the ditches we passed, and then we made the turn toward Phillip’s. At last we came to his gate, which was open; two forlorn cows had wandered out into the road. Michelle threw the car into park and jumped out.

“Git,” she told the cattle, waving her hands in the general direction of the gap. “Go on. Shoo.” They slowly turned, made their leisurely way back inside the fence, and began walking across the snow-covered pasture.

“Nice job,” I said, as she climbed back in and we headed down toward the trailer.

“Farmer’s wife,” she said, and gave me the first big smile I’d seen in hours. “I know plenty of useful things.” She took off down the track, bouncing my foot around painfully before I was able to induce her to use a little more caution.

As we came over the rise, there was a light on in the back of the trailer where Phillip’s bedroom was, but none showing anywhere else. It was dark as dark could be. Michelle pulled up between piles of bottles, wrinkled her nose fastidiously, and came around to help me up and out of the car.

We made our slippery way up to the front door. I banged with my fist, the noise resounding in the clear, cold air. “Phillip,” I called.

“Phillip,” Michelle joined in. “Are you okay?”

The lone light went off.

“Phillip,” I called. “We just want to make sure you’re all right. Phillip, please!” I tried the door. Locked. I rattled it in the frame, but it stayed put.

“Phillip,” Michelle called. “It’s us.” She made a face. “We should have brought him some dinner.” I saw that she had his windbreaker folded over her arm; he’d walked back without even that feeble protection.

“Phillip,” I called again, but I did not pound on the door. I knew he wasn’t going to open it.

“Well,” Michelle said, stamping her feet on the top step to keep warm, “at least we know he got in. Let’s give him a chance to cool off.” She winced. “I mean, warm up.”

She laid his jacket gently in front of the door.

“I know,” I said. “But still—”

“Come on,” she said. She took my arm and led me carefully down the ice-encrusted steps. “We can’t do anything for him until he’s ready to let us.”

“I don’t want to believe that,” I said, petulant as a three-year-old. I stood at the front of the truck and looked up at the trailer. Still no lights.

“I don’t either,” she said, opening her door. “But it doesn’t do any good to try and help somebody do something unless he wants to do it.” She sighed, a long cloud of her warm breath making the night air visible. “Let’s go home.”

Early the next morning, I made my way back to Phillip’s. The gap was open again, although I couldn’t see any cattle in the road, and it was imperfectly opened at that, the post dropped right next to the fence as though it had been opened just far enough for someone to squeeze through. I hobbled over to open it enough for the truck to pass without shredding my tires on the barbed-wire strands, then made the bumpy way down to the trailer.

I honked once or twice, experimentally, and slowly got out of the truck, half expecting to see a rifle barrel emerge from the door. When I tried the knob, I found it locked again, but I noted footprints coming down off the porch and heading off in the direction of the road.

“I hope he’s wearing a good coat,” I muttered and then climbed shivering back into my heated cab. “I hope he has a good coat.” I drove slowly back to town, scanning for him all along the way, but I saw not a trace. On a hunch, I drove to Ellen Smallfeet’s home and made my way to the front door, where I knocked twice, respectfully.

After a period of time familiar to me from my own convalescence, Mrs. Smallfeet cracked the door. When she saw it was me, she threw it wide and invited me in for breakfast.

“Have you seen Phillip?” I asked as she seated me at the table. “I’ve been trying to track him down, but I haven’t had any luck.”

She shook her head. “He’s gone off again,” she said. It was not a question.

“How do you know? Have you talked to him?” I slowed myself down. “I just want to talk to him.”

“He does not want to talk to anyone,” Mrs. Smallfeet said, pouring me a cup of coffee. “When he is like this, he wants to be alone and try to forget his life.”

I took a sip—it was good coffee, strong and fresh.

“Can’t you do something? Can’t you talk to him?”

She shuffled back over to the stove and began to load a plate with scrambled eggs and bacon. My cardiologist would be grateful.

When she said nothing, I tried a new tack. “Will you go over with me, then? To Phillip’s?”

“What for?” she asked as she placed the plate in front of me and produced a fork out of thin air. “So I can freeze on the porch with you while he hides in the back bedroom?”

“He’ll open the door if you’re there.” I took a bite.

She shook her head slowly. “Phillip is my grandson. I love him and he loves me, but he will not do what I tell him. Family should do anything for each other, but this is not always so. You know this.”

“Yes,” I said, remembering Michael disappearing out my back door. “I do.”

“I would like to save him,” she said. “But I do not have that power.” She looked at her hands, wrinkled and spotted with age. “Before we can be saved, we must choose it ourselves.”

“What can I do—” I began, but she rose and placed those aged fingers, dry and slight as a bundle of twigs, across my lips.

“You are not listening,” she said. “I have heard about what happened. So I know that Phillip has shamed himself in front of people he loves. Shamed himself.” And she looked at me with intensity, with the unblinking gaze of a bird of prey. “Ask yourself, John Tilden, how it must feel to do something which you know you should not do. Ask yourself how it must feel to be eaten up with shame, and you will understand.”

This was not just a message about Phillip. “I do understand,” I said. “We must all do the best that we can, even if sometimes we fall short.”

“Do not fall short,” she insisted. “Remember your friend, my grandson. I believe he is looking for an example.”

“I will remember,” I said. I let out a breath. An example. Would I ever get to stop doing the right thing?

I twirled my fork through the eggs, then pushed myself back from the table. “Thank you,” I said.

“What for? You did not even finish your eggs.”

“For your wisdom, and for your care for me.”

“I hear many things,” she said. “The wind talks to me.” And as she said it, the wind howled around the eaves of her tiny particle-board house, and she grinned from ear to ear.

I think we both knew that her best sources were the women at the beauty parlor.

Our tournament game that night in the ancient gymnasium in Calumet was against Hinton. They had decent speed, some height, and they brought much louder fans than we did; maybe more importantly, they knew each other well. Their starters had played together for three years, and they passed the ball to where their teammates would be, an extrasensory awareness that we would not have for some time yet, assuming we ever got it.

We lost by seven, and the margin was that small only because Bird Burke threw off a game-long torpor and arced in four three-pointers in the last three minutes. It was one of our few bright spots. Jimmy Bad Heart Bull played like a football player, like his namesake instead of the antelope we so desperately needed.

“Basketball is a game of agility and endurance,” I reminded him when I pulled him off the court to sit after bulldozing his way to three first-half fouls in only four minutes of play. The sideline lecture is the coach’s classroom, his last chance to instruct—that is, if the player will listen to you and not watch the action on the court or lose himself to the voice inside his head instead of yours. “Jimmy? Look at me. You understand what I’m saying?”

“Yessir,” he said, and he nodded to himself. He wanted to be an antelope, but he had spent so many months being conditioned to knock people on their cans that it was difficult to adopt another way of life.

B. W. alone played with grace and intelligence, and he made excellent decisions, although his teammates did not always justify his faith in them. He finished with eleven points and eight assists. I thought he had every right to hold his head up, but he was not doing this when I found him in the locker room, shoulders slumped, naked except for the towel around his middle.

“That was loads of fun, wasn’t it,” I said, patting him on a humid shoulder.

“Loads of fun,” he agreed, slowly letting out a long stream of air. He looked up at me. “We were awful, Dad. They weren’t even that good, but I never felt like we had a chance to beat them.”

“They didn’t have great players,” I said. “But they played better together. Give it a chance. We’ll get better.”

He looked up at me, misery written on his features. “You think so?”

“Things’ll get better,” I said, because a coach can never tell his players otherwise. “Keep hope alive.”

He smiled. B. W. was, like his mother, a big fan of the Reverend Jesse Jackson.

“I said I’d stick,” he said. “And I will. That’s all I know how to do.”

You and me both, I thought. No matter how much it hurts. “I’m proud of you,” I said. “I couldn’t have asked for a better game from a point guard.”

“Really?” A corner of his mouth crept surreptitiously upward.

I nodded. “Really. I didn’t see a single bad decision. Keep up the good work.”

On the dark bus ride home, though, I had the opportunity to imagine the worst, and it wasn’t difficult to imagine, because already I could see the possible shape of the season: Unless something changed, we could not win. I leaned my head against the window, felt both the cold of the outdoors and the moisture condensed on the inside of the pane, heard it rattle with our slow, steady progress back to town. My stomach knotted up on itself as I thought about a season of games like tonight, of fans yelling abuse, of scoreboards in every gym of every rival proclaiming our utter and humiliating defeat.

To be a good coach, you have to strike the right balance between caring too much and not caring enough. If you care too much, you’re on the expressway to Ulcer City. Nothing in coaching is ever really under your control: If your players perform well, your decisions look good; if they don’t perform to your expectations, you’re a dunce, an idiot, a chowderhead, no matter how brilliant your plans may have been on the chalkboard.

And if you care too little, it won’t hurt so much, but the kids will know it. The fans will know it. You can’t motivate other people if you don’t believe—at least a little—in the dream.

I could already read my boys, an unremarkable group of high school players: steady and dull, or brilliant and inconsistent.

It is a sad thing to see the possible future one game into a season, but such is the curse of vision.

And it’s a sadder thing still for a man’s vision to be directed not to curing the sick or working for peace or even to building a better mousetrap but to pursuing a boy’s game.

“Things’ll get better,” Michelle said when I tried to tell her all this that night, because, of course, a wife can never tell her husband otherwise. “Oh, Carl Vanderkirk called from the Republican.” Carl was the sports editor as well as the news editor, the obituary editor, the society editor, and the entertainment editor. In fact, he was responsible for every word in the paper except the jokes that a local insurance man had been running in his weekly ads since before I was born—knock-knock jokes and riddles and endless variations on the dumb-blonde joke, which was his stock-in-trade.

“Tell Carl we sucked,” B. W. said. “Tell him we were awful. Tell him we should have stayed home and baked cookies.”

“You’re not supposed to say sucked,” Lauren said, sleepy in her nightgown but trying valiantly to stay awake long enough to get the news. “It’s vulgar.”

“Why don’t you go save the world and leave my vocabulary alone,” B. W. said as he poured himself a tall glass of milk and drank it down, his Adam’s apple glugging.

“Why don’t you—” Lauren began, but then she saw my face.

“Why don’t you both be still,” I said. “Let me get my clichés in order.” I tapped my forehead meaningfully a couple of times, then picked up the phone and dialed Carl’s number.

“How’d you do?” he asked, once I’d identified myself. “Tell me everything.”

“Lost sixty-seven to sixty,” I said. “Our top scorer was Larry Burke. He had sixteen points.”

“Give me a meaningful quote, pithy yet succinct.”

I spoke without thinking. “They outplayed, -pointed, and -talented us.”

He was tsking before I even finished my sentence. “John, that’s way too negative this early in the season. We’re trying to keep people interested in basketball. We want them to come to the games, cheer your players, buy my papers.”

“Okay,” I said. “Hold onto that one for later.” I thought for a bit while Carl crunched away at an apple or something on his end of the line. “Okay. There were some fine individual performances tonight. What I’m looking forward to is the boys coming together as a team. Then we’ll really accomplish some things.”

“Good,” he said. “That’ll fly.”

I gave him the individual stats. Everybody wanted to read about their kids, grandkids, or neighbor kids.

“Got it. If you don’t see me at the game tomorrow, call me when it’s over.”

“Sure thing, Carl,” I said. “Good night.”

And so went my life, or at least my basketball routine, into and through the month of December: interminable bumpy rides down country highways on a cold, rattling school bus, suiting up in chilly visiting dressing rooms filled with the ancient smell of sweaty boys who by now had grown old, the repetitive chants of the cheerleaders, the groans of disappointment from our loyal supporters, the occasional bright spot—a steal and breakaway layup by Micheal Wilkes, the beautiful trajectory of a three-pointer when the other team left Bird unguarded, a no-look pass from B. W. to a waiting Jimmy under the basket, and even a couple of notches in the win column.

The rest of my December routine? Feeding cattle in the cold pre-dawn, breaking ice in the stock tanks so they could drink, climbing onto the tractor to haul huge round bales of hay the height of a man over from the Old Place, coffee in town every morning, Lauren playing on the seventh-grade girls’ team two nights a week, church twice on Sunday and once on Wednesday night, almost daily trips by Phillip’s trailer, where I watched bottles with shiny new labels accumulating in a pile of their own just off the steps until the day when I arrived to find a shiny new padlock on the gate and could no longer keep tabs.

“We should have expected it,” Bobby Ray, a man not completely unacquainted with the bottle, said one morning at coffee. “The man’s an alcoholic. An ex-con. He couldn’t ever be trusted.” He didn’t look at me as he said this. I was willing to trust Phillip more than Bobby Ray most of the time. “I’m just glad he pulled this now, and not the night before the game or something.” He set his empty cup down on the table with a thud. “You remember that time he got drunk before the Thomas game?”

“I remember,” I said. “I was supposed to be watching after him. And I also remember that after Coach Von suspended him, he still came back and helped us win state.” I looked around the room and then back at Bobby Ray. “We gave up on him before. I’m not going to make that mistake again.”

“Well then,” he said, rising dispiritedly and dispensing some change onto the table for his coffee and tip, “you’re a better man than I am.”

Maybe. But deep down I figured I was just bad in different ways.

Shortly afterward on a cold and foggy night, I found myself with my head full of thoughts. I had stayed up trying to write letters beside the dying fire, but I couldn’t seem to be honest with anyone, and I couldn’t see the point of writing otherwise. I had consigned three letters to my sister to the fire and written and rewritten a letter to Samantha in my head until my head throbbed. I had been at it so long that even Michelle yawned, gave me a peck on top of the head, and went to bed.

After my fourth bad letter to my sister, I went into the kitchen, put the teapot on the burner, lighted it. I could hear the water begin to boil.

Then the phone rang, loud as a church bell in the quiet night.

I plucked the receiver off the cradle before the first ring was finished, held it for a second listening to the house’s reaction, my heart pounding.

Nothing.

“Hello,” I said.

“I would have hung up if anyone else had answered,” Samantha said, her voice low and happy. “Why haven’t you called me, Johnny? Or written? I haven’t heard from you since Thanksgiving.”

“I was trying to write you a letter tonight,” I said. “But it’s not going so well.” The teapot was starting to breathe steam, and I turned off the flame before the pot began to whistle.

“Still, what have you been doing all this time?”

“I’ve been thinking.” I put my teabag in a cup, poured the water.

“So have I,” she said. “I love the way you feel for other people. That empathy is a real gift. In my business, it would help you sell a lot of real estate. It’s a good thing, being able to understand other people’s needs and desires.” She seemed to become unnecessarily breathy on “desires,” like a Hollywood vamp, but I didn’t mind.

“Needs and desires,” I repeated.

“We all have them, Johnny,” she said.

I dipped the teabag once, twice, lowered it to the side of the saucer.

“You know,” she said, “I told you once that I thought you could do anything you set your mind to.”

“I remember,” I said, stirring in sugar. “But it was more than once.”

“I still believe it,” she went on as though she hadn’t heard me. She paused for a moment, and the only sound was my spoon, clinking quietly as I stirred. “Do you imagine that coaching and farming are going to be enough to make you happy? That they’re the most fitting use of your gifts?”

I thought I heard a noise from deep within the house—movement.

Or the house shifting.

Nothing.

“Are you still coming up for the dance?” I asked.

“Of course I am,” she said. “People will talk. But people are talking now.”

“Yes,” I said. “I guess they are.”

“I never miss a chance to dance,” she said. There was a longer pause, and I could feel her sadness in it. “Do you know that in all the years we were married, Bill never once asked me to dance?”

“Well,” I said. “He was raised Baptist.”

“I didn’t expect you to take his side,” she said, although I could tell she was smiling.

“Believe me,” I said. “I’m not.” I had the vision of our last dance in my head again, the smell of her perfume, the proximity of her body making me dizzy.

I must have been remembering things longer than I thought, because her voice, when it came, had a tinge of impatience to it. “So what’s going to happen next?”

I took a deep breath. “I’m still thinking,” I said.

“I know,” she said, and I could hear her take her own deep breath. “Well, so am I, honey. So am I.”

There was a gentle click, then the buzz of disconnection, and I gently replaced the phone on its receiver, as though I were tucking her into bed.

I walked out into the driveway and turned in a slow circle there.

It was a still night, a little mist mixed in with the fog, and there was not a sound to be heard through the thick moist air. The cottonwoods and windmill stood like ghosts in the light shining from the pole, ethereal, gray-white, translucent. The world felt close and closed in, like I was the only creature on a dead planet.

I listened intently, my hearing growing more and more acute in the silence as I concentrated. But I couldn’t hear anything—nothing but my breath blowing out in a solid cloud to join the rest of the fog surrounding me.

I couldn’t hear anything, but I desperately wanted to.

I stood looking, listening, hoping, for something.

“I guess I’m asking for a sign,” I said at last, looking toward the sky I could not see. “For help. Maybe I haven’t done that often enough.” I listened intently, turning my head slowly back and forth. Even the sound of my own voice seemed to vanish the moment it left my lips. “If You could just let me know that this is where I’m supposed to be, I’ll stay put. Haven’t I always?”

The universe seemed to hold its breath, and I couldn’t tell at that moment if it was the loneliest I’d ever felt or the most aware. And then I did hear something, an unexpected noise out of the nothingness.

I swung around, and then it came again: a chicken or chickens clucking in their shack just back of the herb garden.

In the moment before I recognized the noise, I could have sworn it was somebody chuckling.

During the night, the weather broke, and the next day dawned sunny and bright. The thermometer outside the back window, which had been content to loiter in the forties, made a slow ascent throughout the morning into the sixties, which is where it was when the phone rang midmorning and my neighbor Michael Graywolf announced that a fence was down between us and that a dozen of his cattle had made a break for it and were now wandering aimlessly across my hills.

I wasn’t surprised by this news; this is what cattle do. Cows are senseless creatures who do not understand the concept of home.

“Well, let’s go get ’em,” I said. “Ride on over when you’ve a mind to.” I went out to the barn and saddled up Patches, a black-and-white pinto who held the distinction of being the world’s oldest living cowhorse, rubbed my hand over his silken muzzle, and marveled at how the world had changed since the first time I rode him as a young married man, riding the hills, counting cattle, and listening as my dad carried on a running monologue in his low and gentle voice about how to run a farm.

Michael rode down my driveway about eleven on his dun horse, Pancho. He was wearing that same wide-brimmed black felt hat he said made him look like Stevie Ray Vaughan. I grabbed a Wheeler Brothers Feed cap from the hat rack, pushed it down on my head, and sauntered out to meet him.

“Johnny,” he said, raising his right hand.

“Howdy,” I said, returning the gesture. “This’d be a lot more fun if we were tracking some cattle rustlers back to their hideouts. Any chance of that?”

Michael and I used to play cowboys and Indians together when we were kids, each of us wanting to be what we were not. I had a plastic feather headdress and a tomahawk with a plastic head, and Michael had a great black cowboy hat and matching cap guns. Thirty years earlier, we chased each other across those selfsame hills on foot and on horseback.

He shook his head sadly. “Sorry, man. I’d say we’re talking bovine stupidity here, pure and simple.”

I slid up onto Patches, and we rode back to the first gap behind my house and then through it into the big pasture. Frank made his snuffling, meandering hound dog way in front, alongside, behind us. The sun was bright, the wind calm, and we faced the unusual spectacle of sweat in late December as we rode toward the pond, which was where we both suspected we would go if we were cows on the run. Patches moved sure-footedly down the side of a hill almost too washed out to drive down in the pickup; B. W. and I would have to come back here and dump a couple loads of dirt to make it navigable.

At the top of a rise, we paused for a moment and looked around. To our left, the Canadian River Valley; to our right, my winter wheat, sprouting green across hundreds of acres; ahead of us, the dense cedars that surrounded and masked the pond.

“We looking for some of those white-faced critters you like so much?” I asked, the first words either of us had spoken in some ten minutes.

Michael nodded, and we made our slow way down the twin pickup tracks leading to the pond. Pebbles rolled from beneath the horses’ feet, dry grass rustled, and a jet soared soundlessly overhead on its way from Oklahoma City to somewhere else as the water came in sight, the sun reflecting madly off it like someone had given the world a liberal dusting of diamonds.

“When do your folks get in?” Michael asked as he followed the plane northwest across the sky.

“Day after tomorrow,” I said. “They’ll be here ten days, fly back the second.”

“You going down to the City to get them?”

I nodded, then said, “Yup,” since he was still looking up.

Michael pulled back on the reins, shifted slightly in his saddle to face me better. “You know, we appreciate what you’ve tried to do with Phillip. Everybody from my grandmother on down. Don’t feel bad. Nobody’s ever been able to help him.”

I looked out over the pond, dancing lights and blue water, and didn’t say anything. I spotted the first of Michael’s black-and-white heifers off in the trees and gave Patches a light jab in the flanks with my boot heels. We apprehended the culprits, white cow faces mooning up at us as they chewed contentedly on whatever species of dry ragweed they had discovered. Michael took the rear, I took the flank and rode down strays, and we pushed them slowly back up the hill, across the pasture, past the house, and down the road to Michael’s, a task of some hours. Michael and I rode in easy silence and copious sweat, and I again pondered the fate that had given me a job that left me with hours on end for reflection.

When I got in, my legs were sore and bowed like barrel staves from an afternoon holding onto Patches. Michelle was home from school and cleaning house with a frenzy, she and the vacuum cleaner doing a dance that I momentarily mistook for the Hokey Pokey.

“I want everything to be nice for your folks,” she announced over the roar. “I thought I’d just tidy up a little.”

“Isn’t that why we had kids?” I yelled back.

“Lauren’s at a Christmas party. And you and B. W. have to get ready for the game.”

“Oh yeah,” I said, pulled off my cap, and wiped the sweat off my forehead with the back of my hand one last time prior to getting cleaned up.

It was a home game against Woodward, and I’d been dreading it for two weeks because it promised to be a bloodbath: Woodward had flown through their season thus far undefeated. They’d been to the semis at state the year previous, and although they’d lost two fine players off that team, they still had three starters with state tournament experience. The only Watonga person on the court who had gone to a state tournament was, unfortunately, me.

I sat my team down before the game—which would be the last except for Bill’s game after the holidays—and talked with them about tradition and making new traditions, about individual achievement and teamwork, about home crowds and parents and friends—pretty much every inspirational phrase I could throw at them besides the Gipper and the Great God Almighty.

Then I sat down myself, looked around at them. “Except for that thing against the old folks after Christmas, this is our last game of the year. It is the last game that matters. So here’s how it’s gonna go.” I picked up my clipboard. “Martel and Tyrel—you’re both in the game at the beginning. I want you to run their legs off. Jimmy, I’m going to bring you in off the bench when I see the other guys sucking wind and then you’re going to haul down every rebound in sight.”

I’d made Tyrel Sparks very happy; he and his brother slapped skin in every conceivable congratulatory fashion. Jimmy, for his part, nodded staunchly at me, although I knew that he would rather start than ride lumber.

“Everybody gather round,” I said, and they formed a shaggy-sided circle, inserted their hands like spokes toward the center, and I prayed the same prayer I always prayed before a game: “Lord, watch over every player tonight so that no one gets hurt. Be with us out there on the court. Help us to play our best and give You the glory for it. Amen.”

They said “Amen,” and we ran out onto the court and got a good look at the crowd, mostly ours, and a big one, despite the distractions of the holiday season. My boys ran their pregame drills, shot free throws, and then the starters shot while the reserves rebounded for them. I waved at Lauren, Michelle, Carla Briggs, and the Hooks up in the stands. Bobby Ray joined me on the bench as he sometimes did so he could tell me how he thought I ought to be handling game situations, and then the PA announcer read off our lineups. The teams arrayed themselves around the half-court circle for the tip, and Martel directed it to Bird Burke, who promptly had it stolen from his hands in a blur of motion by Woodward’s small forward, who took it in for an easy layup.

Behind me, Bobby Ray cursed loudly and violently.

“Ixnay on the ussingcay,” I said, inclining my head toward Jimmy and the others on the bench. “Jimmy,” I called back, my eyes on the action, “your hook has looked good this week. How’re you feeling down in the post?”

“I feel strong,” he said. “My shot’s not falling like I want, but it’s coming back.”

I turned to him and blinked. That was quite an outburst, coming from Jimmy. “Well, I want you to shoot that hook tonight. You hit a couple shots, and they’ll collapse on you whenever you get the ball. That’ll open up a lot of other things for us.”

“Yessir,” he said.

Behind us, the crowd was yelling—I could pick out individual parents calling encouragement and instructions. Off to my left stood the cheerleaders shouting and stamping—“Let’s go! Let’s fight! Let’s win tonight!” When B. W. was fouled running the break and stepped to the line, there was a cheer from the other cheerleaders (a breech of etiquette, by the way, to cheer when someone was shooting free throws)—“Rebound that basketball,” stomp clap stomp clap clap, “Rebound that basketball”—and our cheerleaders were jumping and kicking and doing joyful cheerleader things when he made his first shot, providing even greater histrionics when he made the second.

It occurred to me that life would be so much more exciting if we had cheerleaders off the court as well. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to know that whenever you did something right, people were going to jump up and down and call out your name?

With every defensive rebound, every inbound pass, my kids pushed it up the floor quickly, just like I wanted. A gratifying number of times, I looked up to find B. W. dribbling hard up the center of the court, the Sparks brothers on either side of him, just like I’d diagrammed it. When they didn’t have an out-and-out fast break, they’d kick it back out and work it around. This was my team of scorers, not my best defensive team, and I was willing to concede Woodward some points, even let them build up a lead.

I knew Bob Tryon’s philosophy on the other bench. I’d played against him in high school. He was a thinking player then and a thinking coach now, and his offensive approach was slow and methodical: Move the ball around, look for the open man inside or the open shot outside. I thought that if I pushed the pace, I might get Woodward playing outside their game plan, get their kids itching to show they could run with mine.

I knew that no one else had a point guard like mine to run the break, so I was willing to take the risk that they’d score some points off of us.

At the end of the first quarter, we were down eleven points, but the pace of the game had shifted.

“The best-laid plans,” I said, looking over at the Woodward sideline, where Bob was making emphatic gestures, his palms to the floor—slow down.

“What?” Bobby Ray said, then looked and nodded. “It’s working.”

“We’ll see. We’re losing.” I put Jimmy Bad Heart Bull and Ramiro Garza into the game at the start of the second quarter to rebound and give the Sparks brothers a breather and Albert Heap of Birds in for a short stint while B. W. came off the court and gulped air like water. The Sparks and B. W. had run at a furious pace, but it was starting to pay off. The Woodward players weren’t getting as high off the ground; they were starting to leave some of their jump shots a little short—sure signs they were getting tired—and I quickly rotated B. W. and Martel back into the game to take advantage.

By halftime we had pulled back within five, and it might have been two if they hadn’t sunk a long three-pointer at the buzzer. Back in the locker room I closed the door as they seated themselves facing me, and when I turned around, I felt a smile spread slowly across my face.

“You’re finally playing like a team,” I told them. “Our sprinters are wearing them down, our grunters are pulling down rebounds, and right now Bob Tryon is yelling at his team, telling them to remember what they did to get this far undefeated. Great job!”

I left them to sit so I could get a little air of my own and evaluate my plans for the second half—mostly more of the same unless Bob changed his plans, which he was almost sure to do, being the smart coach that he was.

There were things he could get his team to do to try and counter that pace—but what if I pushed even harder? Before halftime was over, I pulled the boys back together and sketched a few diagrams as a reminder as I talked, the ancient chalk occasionally screeching on the blackboard. “Same starters in the second half. We’re going to push the pace even more, continue taking them off their game, make them play ours. We’re going into the backcourt to press and trap on the inbounds, make them hurry their passes.” Smiles spread across their tired faces.

“Martel, Tyrel, I want to see you use that quickness on defense for a change. Trap and release, trap and release.” They nodded.

I turned to the others. “In half-court defense, I want Micheal to release when they shoot and B. W. to move to half-court—you get a head start like that, we can push it down court even faster. Jimmy, you’re in for Bird to start. Keep fighting under the basket. I’m going to depend on you to get those rebounds.” Then I stepped away from the blackboard and toward them, got down on one knee. “We’re going to press them even harder than the first half and see if we can take them down for the count. You’ve done everything right so far. Come on. Let’s take these guys.”

It is an oft-repeated but nonetheless valid truism that any given team can beat any other given team on any given night given certain conditions, so let me stress that what happened on that given night was not a result of my brilliant coaching. It was a result of a lot of things, almost none of them having anything to do with me other than the fact that I fathered a brilliant point guard named Brian Wilson Tilden.

B. W. threw baseball passes, lobbed the ball up for Martel to take to the basket, bounced, backhanded, and flipped the ball behind his back, and when he saw that the Woodward boys were laying way off him to play his passing lanes, he started taking it directly to the basket, scoring nineteen points in the half. Our backcourt press was executed just the way I diagrammed it, with the Sparks brothers closing in so quickly on the inbounds pass that they must have caused half a dozen turnovers. And under our basket, Jimmy pulled down rebound after rebound, elevating over the panting Woodward five and even putting in a few buckets of his own.

It was one of those games you dream about as a coach: The ball always bounced in the right direction, shots that caromed up off the rim came back down through the center of the hoop, calls that could have been decided either way went ours. The last two minutes of the game—normally the most nerve-racking—were actually almost uneventful. Sure, Woodward, down by twelve, tried to foul us to stop the clock, then come down and shoot threes, but we made all our free throws, and their three-pointers looked like rockets launched by hair-brained Lithuanian scientists from backyard workshops.

When B. W. tossed the ball toward the rafters as the final buzzer went off, I walked across the court savoring an eighteen-point win over one of the top teams in the state, and accepted Bob Tryon’s congratulations. I could truthfully say to him, “Everything just went our way, and next time you’d kick our butts.”

I couldn’t say that to anyone else, though, because no one would have heard me. Our fans were berserk; if there had been goalposts, they would have been twisted metal. I couldn’t tell you when Watonga had last won this big a basketball game, but I could certainly say that it hadn’t happened on my watch or in the memory of most of those in attendance. The cheerleaders were still jumping up and down and doing backflips, throwing their hands high and doing that sprinkling thing with their fingers; the crowd was swarming around my players and raising their index fingers toward the ceiling while our high school principal was yelling, “No street shoes on the gym floor”; and Michelle and Carla mobbed me, almost knocking me off my feet.

“Congratulations,” Michelle was shouting before she jumped into my arms and wrapped her legs around me; Carla was pounding me violently on the back; Lauren stood behind her clinging mother and shouted “Nice job” through Dr. Pepper-flavored lip gloss.

“Decorum,” I said to Michelle. “Don’t give your seniors the wrong impression.”

She was laughing and squeezing and sliding back down onto the floor, and Carla was still pounding me and had been joined by Bobby Ray, judging by the violence being done to my shoulder blades, and then the ocean of players and fans and cheerleaders and our poor principal still shouting “No street shoes,” swept over us and I felt myself pulled out of Michelle’s arms and lofted atop the surface of this human sea, full of swirls and eddies, where I saw B. W. and Martel Sparks and Jimmy Bad Heart Bull similarly walking—or at least sitting—on water. I waved across the roiling sea of heads and arms, and they waved back, and if I could ever have stopped time and lived continuously in one moment, I think that instant would have been a serious contender.

But at some point even the greatest of heroes has to put his feet back on the ground and take his own faltering steps, to live and breathe and love and make mistakes like any ordinary human, and after the crowd had carried us around the gym a few times, I found myself slipping from shoulders and hands tired of bearing my weight.

At last, I made contact with my poor scuffed floor.

B. W., deservedly, was the last of us to come to earth, and although the hoarse shouts of “Yeah!” and the jumping up and down continued for some minutes, I made my way under the stands, shaking with the weight of celebration, and back to the locker room.

The boys had played a great game, and they deserved every credit for their win, so I left them a message to that effect on the blackboard, added “Have a Merry Christmas,” underlined “Merry” twice, sighed, and hit the showers.

My own holiday was about to begin.