Sergeant Woods shouts and throws open the door but it’s all over.
Deanie looks up at him impassively and wipes her running nose on her wrist. Naked from the waist up, bloody and torn, she is, bald head and hardware, perfectly natural in the total destruction. What looks like a basketball hoop lies on the floor, amid a lot of broken brick and a broken backboard. She crouches next to Sam but she isn’t touching him. Her hands are tucked between her legs, as if she is cold. Sam is folded neatly on his right side, as if all his joints had suddenly turned to water. He’s bloody—there’s a lot of blood all over—but the cop can’t tell at first glance what the sources are. It takes a second for Woods to register the other man, a slack mound amid the debris, and then he recognizes Tony Lord.
“ ‘god’s not dead,” Deanie explains to Lonnie Woods as if to make a careful theological argument.
“That’s right, baby,” he reassures her, groping for a pulse in Sam’s throat.
“He’s just very tired,” she continues. “He’s had a tough day. He flew all the way from up there”—pointing upward—“and probably he broke something, huh?”
She’s stoned, the cop realizes, or in shock—but oh yes, there’s a vague pot smell in the air. Both, then.
She fingers the earring in the lobe of Sam’s ear. “ ‘This ain’t no disco,’” she says and lets out a long quivering breath.
She sees it clearly, as she saw it happening. Tony was like fire on her, climbing up her body as she tried to climb the rope. And ‘god jumped, she saw it, from above the white brilliance of the floodlights, caught the hoop and turned as on a spindle, and the world fragmented, he tore it down with him, or it followed him, in tongues of tawny gold and red, from a maw of light. She saw the hoop bounce and roll like a toy, and then fall to its side, amid the rain of pain, the gnashing of bricks. She saw the blind red caul filling ‘god’s eyes, painting his face in streaks and checkers. She saw it and she sees it and she strokes it in her mind, no longer needing the photograph of the painting to know what she has seen.
EPILOGUE
October flutters maroon and bronze, blood-red and gold leaf against a painter’s blue sky outside the windows of the high school classroom. There are no students around; it is a parent-teacher conference day and the place is unnaturally quiet. A thin young woman sifts through the folders on her desk waiting for some parent to funnel in from the empty corridors. It’s a warm afternoon and she has a window cracked to let in the tang of fall, her favorite season. The rumble of a motorcycle engine seeps in and is forgotten in the knock at the door that turns out to be the mother of a student, a harried, conscientious fortyish woman. Of course her kid is a good student. As a rule, the parents that show up for the conferences are the ones that don’t need to.
Mrs. Mom is just taking her leave when there is a hesitant rap at the door and a young giant with a cane lurches into the room.
“Miss Carpenter?” he inquires.
She’s still in shock, feeling the crick form in her neck as she stares at him. If he isn’t seven feet tall, he’s within striking distance. He wears a biker’s leather jacket and torn jeans. He sweeps back his hair with one hand and an earring glints from one lobe. His blond mane is tightly braided in narrow rows up one side of his head and fountains in dozens of whiplike tight braids over the crown and other side. He wears a goatee of fine gold around his mouth and small circular dark glasses with gold rims. He props himself on an elaborately carved cane.
“I’m Sam Styles,” he says, offering his hand. “I’m here for Deanie Gauthier.”
Of course. Gauthier. Scarred and tattooed and with her stubble of hair elaborately patterned in razored swirls. No matter what the assigned subject, her essays always come back to basketball and religion. The kid writes about God—always spelling it god with a small g—as if she were going steady with Him. Gauthier’s god is a very down-to-earth kind of deity. One of her essays, the teacher recalls, was about playing one-on-one with god, who evidently dunks like nobody’s business. The teacher has heard about the boyfriend; the other kids talk about him picking up Gauthier after school. They seem to be impressed with him but until now, she had no idea why.
“She keeping up?” he asks with an air of concern identical to the broad-beamed mom who has just left.
“Well, yes, she’s doing very well,” the young woman says.
“Good. Don’t worry about Deanie getting her work done,” he assures her. “We study together. I’m in school too. At the university.” He seems surprised about that. “I have to study a lot,” he confesses. “But I don’t mind. I kind of like it, actually. History, that’s what I like. I’m taking a course about the Industrial Revolution.”
“How interesting,” the teacher says and to her own surprise, means it. Kids are always surprising her. That’s the biggest reason she’s still teaching.
“If I make up my deficiencies,” the boy explains, “I could be a walk-on.”
“A walk-on?”
“On the basketball team.
